The Underground Railroad (Signed First Edition of this 2016 National Book Award Winner)

Colson Whitehead

ISBN 10: 0385542313 / ISBN 13: 9780385542319

Published by Doubleday, New York January 2016, 2016

About this Item

SIGNED BY WHITEHEAD ON PUBLISHER'S TIPPED IN SHEET. used hardcover in a dust jacket. jacket is a bit worn about the edges and somewhat scuffed, but without any serious tears. pages and binding are clean, straight and tight. there are no marks to the text or other serious flaws.

Seller Inventory # 1400201

Bibliographic Details

• Title: The Underground Railroad (Signed First Edition of this 2016 National Book Award Winner)
• Publisher: Doubleday, New York January 2016
• Publication Date: 2016
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0385542313
• ISBN 13: 9780385542319
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition: 1st Edition.
• Printing: 1st Edition
• Condition: SIGNED / VG-
• Dust Jacket Condition: Very Good
• Signed: Signed By Author
• Seller catalogs:
  • lit / fiction

About this title

Synopsis

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.