The Underground Railroad

Colson Whitehead 2016

Devastation Rating

Existential Dread
historical literary fiction injustice trauma survival

Our Take

The Underground Railroad is literal here — tracks, tunnels, trains — and Whitehead uses that literalisation to make the horror of slavery strange again. Cora's journey is through American history as a series of nightmares, each state she passes through offering a different face of the same violence.

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