The Underground Railroad

Summary

Reimagining American history, the novel follows Cora, a young woman fleeing a Georgia plantation, as she travels along an Underground Railroad that is here a literal subterranean network of tracks and trains running beneath the South. Each state she passes through stages a different nightmare of racial terror, blending alternate history with searing realism. Whitehead's fusion of speculative invention and historical reckoning made the book a defining novel of its decade.