Oprah Chooses The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead for Oprah's Book Club

Posted on August 5, 2016

She's still got the Midas touch. On Tuesday, Oprah Winfrey chose Colson Whitehead's novel The Underground Railroad as her newest Oprah's Book Club pick. The book is now selling like crazy. On Amazon it is already the 6th bestseller in Books of all genres.

The novel is written in the style of Gulliver's Travels, combining the historical facts of American slavery with the travels of a young slave named Cora who escapes north to find a better life. Whitehead said when he was a child he heard about the underground railroad and assumed it was an actual railroad, instead of a network of people who helped slaves escape to the north.

So he used a bit of magical realism and wrote the novel in which Cora rides an actual underground railroad to get from the north to the south. As in Gulliver's Travels, she stops in different places. Each state is different and Cora experiences quite a bit of culture shock, not to mention danger, in her travels. Whitehead plays with time in the book, using real incidents in American history placed in another time period to illustrate certain concepts.

The book is available now just about everywhere. On Amazon, you can get a text or audio copy for your Kindle or pick up a hardcover a paperback or an audio CD.

Here is Oprah announcing the new book that she is super excited about: