A Midlife Crisis

National Book Award winner, MacArthur fellow, and New York Times bestselling author Colson Whitehead visits Google to discuss his novel, "The Underground Railroad." The novel tells the story of Cora, a slave on a cotton plantation in Georgia. An outcast even among her fellow Africans, she is on the cusp of womanhood, where greater pain awaits. And so when Caesar, a slave who has recently arrived from Virginia, urges her to join him on the Underground Railroad, she seizes the opportunity and escapes with him. In Colson Whitehead's ingenious conception, the Underground Railroad is no mere metaphor: engineers and conductors operate a secret network of actual tracks and tunnels beneath the Southern soil. Cora embarks on a harrowing flight from one state to the next, encountering strange yet familiar iterations of her own world at each stop. As Whitehead brilliantly re-creates the terrors of the antebellum era, he weaves in the saga of our nation, from the brutal abduction of Africans to the unfulfilled promises of the present day. The Underground Railroad is both the gripping tale of one woman's will to escape the horrors of bondage—and a powerful meditation on the history we all share. Originally published in September of 2016.

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