About 6 h 45 min · at 30 minutes a day, about 14 days
Estimated from the page count of this edition. Dense books can take longer than the estimate.
About the book
Cora, enslaved on a Georgia cotton plantation and isolated even among the other enslaved people, escapes with Caesar through a secret railway beneath the Southern states. Trains and hidden stations carry them north, but slave catcher Ridgeway pursues them, and each state imposes different limits on Black freedom and the people willing to offer shelter.
Reader notes
The literary novel combines an escape narrative with imagined versions of American history, so its geography and institutions depart deliberately from historical fact. Cora’s journey is interrupted by shorter chapters about people connected to her. The telling is often restrained, but the brutality is severe: slavery, rape and physical abuse are fundamental to the story.
How it reads
Writing style
Atmospheric · Essayistic · Lyrical · Spare
Tone
Atmospheric · Bleak · Tense · Unsettling
Structure
Braided · Episodic · Nonlinear
Driven by
Character · Ideas · Plot
Point of view
Multiple viewpoints · Third person, limited
Setting
Georgia · Indiana · North Carolina · South Carolina
Reading complexity
Writing
4 / 5
Ideas
4 / 5
Structure
4 / 5
Background knowledge
2 / 5
About this profile
Collected’s assessment, not reader ratings. Complexity runs from 1 (least demanding) to 5 (most demanding).
Writing
How much attention the sentences and language require.
Ideas
How much interpretation or abstract reasoning the book asks of you.
Structure
How much you need to keep track of speakers, timelines and connections.
Background knowledge
Prior knowledge needed to follow the book, beyond what it explains.
Emotional intensity
Emotional pressure, from gentle (1) to intense (5). Separate from difficulty.
Themes
Community
Freedom
Migration and displacement
Oppression
Race and racism
Survival
Content notes
Violence
Strong
Sexual content
Mild
Swearing
Strong
Substance use
Mild
Abuse
Strong
Self-harm or suicide
Mild
Standing and awards
Highly regarded
Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, 2017
Andrew Carnegie Medals for Excellence in Fiction and Nonfiction, 2017
Arthur C. Clarke Award, 2017
Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, 2017
National Book Award, 2016
Kirkus Prize finalist, 2016
Booker Prize longlist, 2017
NYT 10 Best Books, 2016
Questions readers ask
How long is it?
336 pages in the Anchor 2018 paperback edition.
Which edition is shown here?
Anchor · 2018 · paperback. ISBN 9780345804327.
How long does it take to read The Underground Railroad?
About 6 hours 45 minutes at 50 pages an hour, based on the 336-page Anchor edition. Dense books can take longer.
About the author
Colson Whitehead
Colson Whitehead is an American novelist and nonfiction writer whose work ranges across historical fiction, speculative allegory, horror, noir, satire, and the urban essay. He repeatedly uses the machinery of genre to examine race, power, institutional violence, and the unstable promises of American life. The Intuitionist turns elevator inspection into an elaborate contest between rival systems of knowledge, while The Underground Railroad makes a historical metaphor physically real. The Nickel Boys takes a more direct, spare approach to the brutality concealed within a segregated reform school. Elsewhere, Whitehead finds social comedy and civic history in the crime plot of Harlem Shuffle, and uses the zombie novel in Zone One to satirize bureaucracy, consumer habits, and the language of recovery. His nonfiction shares this attentiveness to systems and places: The Colossus of New York treats the city as both a built environment and an accumulation of private memories. Across these shifts in form, his fiction remains grounded in character, atmosphere, and exacting scrutiny of public myths.
