The Underground Railroad

Colson Whitehead's The Underground Railroad, published by Doubleday in 2016, is set in the antebellum South and centres on Cora, who is enslaved on a cotton plantation in Georgia. A newer arrival, Caesar, tells her about the Underground Railroad, and in this novel it is not a figure of speech but an actual rail network: engineers and conductors run tracks and tunnels through the soil of the Southern states, with stations and safe houses along the way. Cora decides to take the risk and leaves the plantation with Caesar, heading north with a slave catcher in pursuit.

The book alternates between Cora's own perspective and chapters given to other characters, among them her grandmother, Ajarry; Ridgeway, the slave catcher; a South Carolina doctor conducting a social experiment; the wife of a station agent in North Carolina; and Cora's mother, Mabel. The chapters are arranged by location, moving through Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, Tennessee and Indiana, and on towards a North that is never given a name. Each place the two of them reach has its own arrangements for Black people and its own particular danger, so that escape does not mean arriving somewhere settled.

The Underground Railroad received the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Book Award for Fiction, along with the Arthur C. Clarke Award and the 2017 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence. It was adapted as a television miniseries written and directed by Barry Jenkins, released in May 2021.