Colson Whitehead is a multi-award winning and bestselling author whose works include The Nickel Boys, The Underground Railroad, The Noble Hustle, Zone One, Sag Harbor, The Intuitionist, John Henry Days, Apex Hides the Hurt and a collection of essays, The Colossus of New York. He is one of only four novelists to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction twice and is a recipient of MacArthur and Guggenheim fellowships. For The Underground Railroad, Whitehead won the National Book Award, the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, the Arthur C. Clarke Award for Fiction, the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence and was longlisted for the Booker Prize. He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for a second time for The Nickel Boys, which also won the George Orwell Prize for Political Fiction and The Kirkus Prize. The Underground Railroad has been adapted as an Amazon Prime TV series, produced and directed by the Academy Award winning director Barry Jenkins, and was broadcast in 2021. He lives with his family in New York City.
It has invaded both my sleeping and waking thoughts . . . Each
character feels alive with a singular humanity . . . Whitehead is
on a roll, the reviews have been sublime
*Guardian*
An engrossing and harrowing novel
*Sunday Times*
[A] brutal, vital, devastating novel...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
*Observer*
This thrilling tale of escape from a deep south plantation takes in
terror, beauty and the history of human tragedy..This uncanny novel
never attempts to deliver a message - instead it tells one of the
most compelling stories I have ever read. Cora's strong, graceful
hands touch on the greatest tragedies of our history
*Cynthia Bond, Guardian*
It's so good it's hard to praise it without whipping out the
cliches: it's an elegant, devastating powerhouse of a book,
following a young black woman all over America as she tries to
escape the horrors of slavery. When it was published with Oprah's
imprimatur, in August, it was universally acclaimed. It deserved
it
*Guardian*
One of the best, if not the best, book I've read this year . . .
Whitehead never exploits his subject matter, and in fact it's the
sparseness of the novel that makes it such a punch in the gut
*Stylist*
My book of the year by some distance...It's a profound and
important novel, but more than anything it's an absurdly good read,
gripping you in its tightly wound plot, astonishing you with its
leaps of imagination. If Whitehead doesn't win every prize going
next year, I'll appear on Saturday Review in my underpants
*Observer, Best Fiction of 2016*
Whitehead is a superb storyteller . . . [he] brilliantly
intertwines his allegory with history . . . writing at the peak of
his game . . . Whitehead's achievement is truly remarkable: by
giving the Underground Railroad a new mythology, he has found a way
of confronting other myths, older and persistent, about the United
States. His book cannot have enough readers
*Telegraph*
It is an extraordinary novel, a rich, confident work that will
deservedly win - on the basis of literary merit as well as moral
purpose . . . History and human experience as well as an artist's
obligation to tell the truth have shaped a virtuoso novel that
should be read by every American as well as readers across the
world. And it will be, it should be
*Irish Times*
An utterly transporting piece of storytelling
*The Pool*
Bestselling author Colson Whitehead's novel is a searing indictment
of slavery with a detailed inventory of man's inhumanity to man -
and Cora's flight is a harrowing and shocking trip for the
reader
*Daily Mail*
A stunning, brutal and hugely imaginative book. It's a favourite of
both Oprah Winfrey and Barack Obama. It is painful history
re-imagined in a powerful and brilliant way
*Emerald St*
Recommended by none other than Obama AND Oprah, The Underground
Railroad arrives deserving every last drop of hype that's come its
way . . . There are many twists and turns in Cora's long,
treacherous journey towards freedom and while The Underground
Railroad is at times brutal and disturbing, it's also hopeful and
an addictive, compulsive read. After reading it, a corner of your
heart will always belong to Cora. An instant classic
*Red*
Reaches the marrow of your bones, settles in and stays forever . .
. a tour de force
*Oprah Winfrey*
This bravura novel reimagines that same network as a real
subterranean railway, upon which a girl named Cora flees the
slave-catcher Ridgeway. Throughout, horrific experiences are
rendered in lapidary prose, but it's Cora's daring that provides
the story's redemptive oomph
*Mail on Sunday*
Inventive and hard-hitting
*Metro*
It is a bold way of reimagining the slave experience and, in the
capable hands of Whitehead, succeeds triumphantly
*Mail on Sunday*
Brutal, tender, thrilling and audacious
*Guardian*
An enchanting tale . . . full of vivid images, learned allusions
and astute observations . . . The most important and acclaimed
American novel of the past year
*London Review of Books*
I stayed up way too late to finish this... It will be haunting me
in the best way
*Celeste Ng, author of Everything I Never Told You*
A fantastical picaresque through the dark side of American
history
*Daily Telegraph*
Thrilling and unsentimental
*Scotsman*
The Underground Railroad is a noble descendant of the great
narratives of slavery, and among the very finest of its novels
*Times Literary Supplement*
An audaciously imagined and profoundly moving novel
*Express*
Stunning and unsentimental . . . required reading
*Herald*
A charged and important novel that pushed at the boundaries of
fiction
*Guardian, Best Books of 2016*
Leaves the reader with a devastating understanding of the terrible
human costs of slavery . . . with echoes of Toni Morrison's
Beloved, Victor Hugo's Les Miserables and Ralph Ellison's Invisible
Man, and with brush strokes borrowed from Jorge Luis Borges, Franz
Kafka and Jonathan Swift . . . Colson Whitehead has told a story
essential to our understanding of the American past and the
American present
*New York Times*
The Underground Railroad isn't the modern slave narrative it first
appears to be. It is something grander and more piercing, a
dazzling antebellum anti-myth...Whitehead's prose is quick as a
runaway's footsteps
*New York Review of Books*
A book that resonates with deep emotional timbre. The Underground
Railroad reanimates the slave narrative, disrupts our settled sense
of the past and stretches the ligaments of history right into our
own era . . . The story charges along with incredible power . . .
The canon of essential novels about America's peculiar institution
just grew by one
*Washington Post*
[The Underground Railroad] is really good - good, in fact, in just
about every way a novel can be good . . . a grave and fully
realized masterpiece, a weird blend of history and fantasy that
will have critics rightfully making comparisons to Toni Morrison
and Gabriel García-Márquez
*Boston Globe*
This book should be required reading in classrooms across the
country alongside Huckleberry Finn and To Kill a Mockingbird. If
this isn't Colson Whitehead's masterpiece, it's definitely the best
book of the year and maybe the most important work of the
decade
*Chicago Tribune*
Masterful, urgent . . . one of the finest novels written about our
country's still unabsolved original sin
*USA Today*
The Underground Railroad has serious ambition, especially within
the tradition of literary satire . . . With deadpan virtuosity and
muted audacity, Whitehead integrates the historical details of
slavery with the present
*Los Angeles Review of Books*
Whitehead is a fantastic novelist, one of the best in America
today. (Certainly better than Franzen.)... Oprah is right: The
Underground Railroad is Whitehead's best book yet... This is the
rare critically acclaimed bestseller that deserves every ounce of
its adoration, and more. The hype is real. You can believe Oprah,
and its scores of other fans, including some guy who took The
Underground Railroad on summer vacation and can't stop talking
about its "terrific... powerful" portraiture of race in America.
That fan's name is Barack Obama
*Seattle Times*
Magnetizing and wrenching . . . Each stop Cora makes along the
Underground Railroad reveals another shocking and malignant symptom
of a country riven by catastrophic conflicts, a poisonous moral
crisis, and diabolical violence. Each galvanizing scene blazes with
terror and indictment as Whitehead tracks the consequences of the
old American imperative to seize, enslave, and profit . . .
Hard-driving, lasersharp, artistically superlative, and deeply
compassionate, Whitehead's unforgettable odyssey adds a clarion new
facet to the literature of racial tyranny and liberation
*Booklist*
Startlingly original . . . Whitehead continues the African-American
artists' inquiry into race mythology and history with rousing
authority and razor-sharp ingenuity; he is now assuredly a writer
of the first rank
*Kirkus*
In powerful, precise prose, at once spellbinding and ferocious, the
book follows Cora's incredible journey north, step by step . . .
the story is literature at its finest and history at its most
barbaric. Would that this novel were required reading for every
American citizen
*Publishers Weekly*
Colson Whitehead's staggering, haunted new novel . . . [is] a book
that is fully expected to win all the awards this year - Pulitzer
Prize, Booker Prize, National Book Award, etc - and it deserves
every last one
*Chapter 16*
Hard-driving, laser-sharp, artistically superlative, and deeply
compassionate, Whitehead's unforgettable odyssey adds a clarion new
facet to the literature of racial tyranny and liberation
*Andrew Carnegie Medals for Excellence, shortlist announcement*
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