What is it about?
The Underground Railroad is American writer Colson Whitehead’s first Pulitzer Winning novel. Whitehead’s novel takes a simple speculative gesture — turning the metaphorical Underground Railroad into a literal subterranean train line — and uses it to examine the long afterlife of American slavery. The underground railroad, in this novel, is an actual railroad with stations below farms and houses. The first train takes the characters to South Carolina, where they are able to live more like free people. But with caveats. The move from Georgia to South Carolina sets the pattern of telling a series of stories about Black experience not just during slavery but throughout American history.
The book isn’t interested in fantasy for its own sake; the device exists to show how flight, freedom, and violence repeat in different forms across geography. Each state that the reader travels through becomes a variation on oppression: some overt, some politely disguised, all part of a continuum. Whitehead resists the temptation to dramatise suffering for emotional impact. Instead, the prose stays cool, almost flat, letting the historical brutality speak without embellishment.
Why we loved it
The structure works: each stop on the “railroad” becomes a window into a different social experiment, revealing how racism adapts rather than disappears. Whitehead’s calm tone gives the book its power — a refusal to manipulate emotion or offer false comfort. Cora, the protagonist, is written with dignity but without myth-making, and the secondary characters sharpen the novel’s political imagination. The alternate world feels carefully constructed, bringing together every cruelty that it is capable of. And hoe literacy and community help resist overcome the psychic damages. Whitehead heavily researched slavery and the era, using primary sources and slave narratives to ground his imaginative work.
What might not work
The distancing effect of the prose might not work for every reader. Although it is also true that much of its power is built through the restraint. The novel is spare to the point of occasional emotional flatness. Some of the speculative device fades in and out of focus. But, the details Whitehead layers over this single leap of imagination, also keeps it fresh and insightful.
Why you should read it
Whitehead’s goal was to reveal the “truth of things, not the facts,” using a fantastical structure to convey the profound and often unbelievable brutality and systemic nature of American slavery, making it feel more real. Whitehead shows how you can write about a catastrophic history without falling into spectacle or sentimentality. The novel is a reminder that trauma doesn’t need stylistic fireworks to register. Read it for its intelligence, its design, and its commitment to showing how systems survive even when people escape them. It is a book that stays with you not because of shock but because of its steadiness.
Score: 9.1/10
Babel School of Languages 