After Hours Book Club: ‘The Underground Railroad’ by Colson Whitehead

Thursday, May 18, 2023
7:30 pm - 8:30 pm

About the Book

Cora is 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, like Gulliver, strange yet familiar iterations of her own world at each stop.

About the author

Colson Whitehead

Colson Whitehead was born in 1969, and was raised in Manhattan. The Underground Railroad, a novel, was published in the summer of 2016. It won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, the Carnegie Medal for Fiction, and was a #1 New York Times Bestseller. Colson Whitehead’s reviews, essays, and fiction have appeared in a number of publications, such as the New York Times, The New Yorker, New York Magazine, Harper’s and Granta. He lives in New York City.

About the event

Please note any accommodation requests in the Special Needs section of the registration form.

If you have any other questions, please contact Carrie Ratterman at cratterman@cc-pl.org

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Alexandria Branch