The Underground Railroad: A Novel

ISBN-13: 9780345804327 / Angielski / Miękka / 2018 / 336 str.

Colson Whitehead

Opis

From prize-winning, bestselling author Colson Whitehead, a magnificent tour de force chronicling a young slave's adventures as she makes a desperate bid for freedom in the antebellum South

Cora is a slave on a cotton plantation in Georgia. Life is hell for all the slaves, but especially bad for Cora; an outcast even among her fellow Africans, she is coming into womanhood--where even greater pain awaits. When Caesar, a recent arrival from Virginia, tells her about the Underground Railroad, they decide to take a terrifying risk and escape. Matters do not go as planned--Cora kills a young white boy who tries to capture her. Though they manage to find a station and head north, they are being hunted.
In Whitehead's ingenious conception, the Underground Railroad is no mere metaphor--engineers and conductors operate a secret network of tracks and tunnels beneath the Southern soil. Cora and Caesar's first stop is South Carolina, in a city that initially seems like a haven. But the city's placid surface masks an insidious scheme designed for its black denizens. And even worse: Ridgeway, the relentless slave catcher, is close on their heels. Forced to flee again, Cora embarks on a harrowing flight, state by state, seeking true freedom.
Like the protagonist of Gulliver's Travels, Cora encounters different worlds at each stage of her journey--hers is an odyssey through time as well as space. As Whitehead brilliantly re-creates the unique terrors for black people in the pre-Civil War era, his narrative seamlessly weaves the saga of America from the brutal importation of Africans to the unfulfilled promises of the present day. The Underground Railroad is at once a kinetic adventure tale of one woman's ferocious will to escape the horrors of bondage and a shattering, powerful meditation on the history we all share.

Recenzje

WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE, THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD, THE ALA ANDREW CARNEGIE MEDAL AND THE HURSTON/WRIGHT AWARD

NAMED A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR BY THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW, THE WALL STREET JOURNAL, WASHINGTON POST, TIME, PEOPLE, NPR AND MORE

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

A PARADE BEST BOOK OF ALL TIME

OPRAH'S BOOK CLUB PICK

Terrific. Barack Obama
 
An American masterpiece. NPR
 
Stunningly daring. The New York Times Book Review

"A triumph." The Washington Post

Potent. . . .  Devastating. . . . Essential. Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

Whitehead's best work and an important American novel. The Boston Globe

Electrifying. . . . Tense, graphic, uplifting and informed, this is a story to share and remember. People

Heart-stopping. Oprah Winfrey

The Underground Railroad is inquiring into the very soul of American democracy. . . . A stirring exploration of the American experiment. The Wall Street Journal

A brilliant reimagining of antebellum America. The New Republic

Colson Whitehead s book blends the fanciful and the horrific, the deeply emotional and the coolly intellectual. Whathe comes up with is an American masterpiece. Ann Patchett, author of Bel Canto

The Underground Railroad enters the pantheon of . . . the Great American Novels. . . . A wonderful reminder of whatgreat literature is supposed to do: open our eyes, challengeus, and leave us changed by the end. Esquire

[Whitehead] is the best living American novelist. Chicago Tribune

Masterful, urgent. . . . One of the finest novels written aboutour country s still unabsolved original sin. USA Today

Brilliant. . . . An instant classic that makes vivid the darkest, most horrific corners of America s history of brutality against black people. HuffPost

Singular, utterly riveting. . . . You ll be shaken and stunned by Whitehead s imaginative brilliance. . . . The Underground Railroad is a book both timeless and timely. It is a book for now; it is a book that is necessary. BuzzFeed

Whitehead is a writer of extraordinary stylistic powers. . . . [The Underground Railroad] offers many testaments to Whitehead s considerable talents and examines a deeply relevant and disturbing period of American history. The Christian Science Monitor

[An] ingenious novel. . . . A successful amalgam: a realistically imagined slave narrative and a crafty allegory; a tense adventure tale and a meditation on America s defining values. Minneapolis Star Tribune

Whitehead s novel unflinchingly turns our attention to the foundations of the America we know now. Elle

Perfectly balances the realism of its subject with fabulist touches that render it freshly illuminating. Time

I haven t been as simultaneously moved and entertained bya book for many years. This is a luminous, furious, wildly inventive tale that not only shines a bright light on one of the darkest periods of history, but also opens up thrilling new vistas for the form of the novel itself. The Guardian

O autorze

Colson Whitehead is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Underground Railroad, which in 2016 won the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction and the National Book Award and was named one of the Ten Best Books of the Year by The New York Times Book Review, as well as The Noble Hustle, Zone One, Sag Harbor, The Intuitionist, John Henry Days, Apex Hides the Hurt, and The Colossus of New York. He is also a Pulitzer Prize finalist and a recipient of the MacArthur and Guggenheim Fellowships. He lives in New York City.