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."
Ficha técnica
Editorial: Doubleday Transworld Usa
ISBN: 9780385537032
Idioma: Inglés
Encuadernación: Tapa dura
Fecha de lanzamiento: 13/09/2016
Año de edición: 2016
Especificaciones del producto
Escrito por Colson Whitehead
Colson Whitehead, escriptor i professor universitari, va néixer el 1969 i ha crescut a Manhattan. Autor de diverses obres de ficció i assaig, va revolucionar l’escena literària estatunidenca amb El ferrocarril subterrani (Periscopi, 2017), una obra amb la qual va obtenir els prestigiosos National Book Award 2016 i el Premi Pulitzer d’obres de ficció 2017. Això el va catapultar directament a l’exclusiva llista dels autors que han guanyat aquests dos premis per un mateix llibre i entre els quals hi ha noms com William Faulkner, John Updike i Annie Proulx. L’any 2020 va obtenir el seu segon Premi Pulitzer d’obres de ficció per "Els nois de la Nickel" (Periscopi, 2020), un èxit que abans d’ell només han aconseguit Booth Tarkington, William Faulkner i John Updike. "Manifest delictiu" és la segona obra de l’anomenada Trilogia de Harlem, iniciada l’any 2023 amb El ritme de Harlem.