What if the underground railroad was a literal railroad? And what if each state, as a runaway slave was going north, was a different state of American possibility, an alternative America?"

Colson Whitehead's inventive novel follows Cora and Caesar as they escape from a Georgia cotton plantation and run north in pursuit of freedom, aided by the stationmasters and conductors of the Underground Railroad. This brilliant and at times brutal novel about the history of slavery and racism in America, won the US National Book Award for Fiction in 2016 and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2017.

Read by Clarke Peters (The Wire, Treme, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri)
Abridged in ten parts by Sara Davies. Produced by Mair Bosworth for BBC Audio in Bristol.
First broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in February 2017. Show less