My Oprah’s Book Club giveaway – Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad

Oprah’s new book club pick, Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad: A Novel, has me intrigued.

This book apparently moves into the fantastical. I’m so interested to read how Whitehead executes this with such a heavy and historical subject.

I have a few books in queue before this one, but I plan to start reading it within the next couple of weeks.

Will you join me?

I purchased two copies of this book – one for me and one to give away!

You can sign up to win my extra book here:

a Rafflecopter giveaway

(I will mail one new hard copy anywhere in the United States.)

In the meantime, you can sign up to read along with Oprah’s Book Club at and/or join the official goodreads reading group here.

Here’s the description from the book sleeve:

“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.”

Tell me why you are excited to read this book below!