Search query: underground railroad colson whitehead

Product: Nothing to See Here
Brand: Audible
Description: A 2020 Audie winner - best female narrator

A Read with Jenna Today Show Book Club Pick!

Audiobook performed by Marin Ireland.

"I can’t believe how good this book is.... It’s wholly original. It’s also perfect.... Wilson writes with such a light touch.... The brilliance of the novel [is] that it distracts you with these weirdo characters and mesmerizing and funny sentences and then hits you in a way you didn’t see coming. You’re laughing so hard you don’t even realize that you’ve suddenly caught fire." (Taffy Brodesser-Akner, New York Times Book Review)

Kevin Wilson’s best book yet - a moving and uproarious novel about a woman who finds meaning in her life when she begins caring for two children with remarkable and disturbing abilities.

Lillian and Madison were unlikely roommates and yet inseparable friends at their elite boarding school. But then, Lillian had to leave the school unexpectedly in the wake of a scandal, and they’ve barely spoken since. Until now, when Lillian gets a letter from Madison pleading for her help.

Madison’s twin stepkids are moving in with her family, and she wants Lillian to be their caretaker. However, there’s a catch: The twins spontaneously combust when they get agitated, flames igniting from their skin in a startling but beautiful way. Lillian is convinced Madison is pulling her leg, but it’s the truth.

Thinking of her dead-end life at home, the life that has consistently disappointed her, Lillian figures she has nothing to lose. Over the course of one humid, demanding summer, Lillian and the twins learn to trust each other - and stay cool - while also staying out of the way of Madison’s buttoned-up politician husband. Surprised by her own ingenuity yet unused to the intense feelings of protectiveness she feels for them, Lillian ultimately begins to accept that she needs these strange children as much as they need her - urgently and fiercely. Couldn’t this be the start of the amazing life she’d always hoped for?

With white-hot wit and a big, tender heart, Kevin Wilson has written his best book yet - a most unusual story of parental love.
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Product: The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead (Book Analysis): Detailed Summary, Analysis and Reading Guide (BrightSummaries.com)
Description: Unlock the more straightforward side of The Underground Railroad with this concise and insightful summary and analysis!
This engaging summary presents an analysis of The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead, which follows Cora, a teenage runaway slave, as she travels through America after escaping a cruel owner and a brutal existence on a plantation, pursued all the while by the feared slave catcher Ridgeway. In her escape, she uses a subterranean railway manned by free former slaves and sympathetic whites, making the novel an intriguing reimagining of the real system of safe houses and transport routes in the antebellum USA. The Underground Railroad is Colson Whitehead’s best-known novel, and was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2017.
Find out everything you need to know about The Underground Railroad in a fraction of the time!
This in-depth and informative reading guide brings you:
• A complete plot summary
• Character studies
• Key themes and symbols
• Questions for further reflection
Why choose BrightSummaries.com?
Available in print and digital format, our publications are designed to accompany you on your reading journey. The clear and concise style makes for easy understanding, providing the perfect opportunity to improve your literary knowledge in no time.
See the very best of literature in a whole new light with BrightSummaries.com!
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Product: The Water Dancer (Oprah’s Book Club): A Novel
Description: Number one New York Times best seller

Oprah’s Book Club Pick

From the National Book Award-winning author of Between the World and Me, a boldly conjured debut novel about a magical gift, a devastating loss, and an underground war for freedom.

“This potent book about America’s most disgraceful sin establishes [Ta-Nehisi Coates] as a first-rate novelist.” (San Francisco Chronicle)

In development as a major motion picture

Adapted by Ta-Nehisi Coates and Kamilah Forbes, produced by MGM, Plan B, and Oprah Winfrey’s Harpo Films

Nominated for the NAACP Image Award

Named One of Paste’s Best Novels of the Decade

Named One of the Best Books of the Year by:

Time

The Washington Post

Chicago Tribune

Vanity Fair

Esquire

Good Housekeeping

Paste

Town & Country

The New York Public Library

The Dallas Morning News

Kirkus Reviews

Library Journal

“Nearly every paragraph is laced through with dense, gorgeously evocative descriptions of a vanished world and steeped in its own vivid vocabulary.” (Entertainment Weekly)

Young Hiram Walker was born into bondage. When his mother was sold away, Hiram was robbed of all memory of her - but was gifted with a mysterious power. Years later, when Hiram almost drowns in a river, that same power saves his life. This brush with death births an urgency in Hiram and a daring scheme: to escape from the only home he’s ever known.

So begins an unexpected journey that takes Hiram from the corrupt grandeur of Virginia’s proud plantations to desperate guerrilla cells in the wilderness, from the coffin of the Deep South to dangerously idealistic movements in the North. Even as he’s enlisted in the underground war between slavers and the enslaved, Hiram’s resolve to rescue the family he left behind endures.

This is the dramatic story of an atrocity inflicted on generations of women, men, and children - the violent and capricious separation of families - and the war they waged to simply make lives with the people they loved. Written by one of today’s most exciting thinkers and writers, The Water Dancer is a propulsive, transcendent work that restores the humanity of those from whom everything was stolen.

Praise for The Water Dancer

"Ta-Nehisi Coates is the most important essayist in a generation and a writer who changed the national political conversation about race with his 2015 memoir, Between the World and Me. So naturally his debut novel comes with slightly unrealistic expectations - and then proceeds to exceed them. The Water Dancer...is a work of both staggering imagination and rich historical significance.... What’s most powerful is the way Coates enlists his notions of the fantastic, as well as his fluid prose, to probe a wound that never seems to heal.... Timeless and instantly canon-worthy." (Rolling Stone)
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Product: The Nickel Boys (Winner 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction): A Novel
Description: NATIONAL BESTSELLER • In this Pulitzer Prize-winning follow-up to The Underground Railroad, Colson Whitehead brilliantly dramatizes another strand of American history through the story of two boys unjustly sentenced to a hellish reform school in Jim Crow-era Florida.

When Elwood Curtis, a black boy growing up in 1960s Tallahassee, is unfairly sentenced to a juvenile reformatory called the Nickel Academy, he finds himself trapped in a grotesque chamber of horrors. Elwood’s only salvation is his friendship with fellow “delinquent” Turner, which deepens despite Turner’s conviction that Elwood is hopelessly naive, that the world is crooked, and that the only way to survive is to scheme and avoid trouble. As life at the Academy becomes ever more perilous, the tension between Elwood’s ideals and Turner’s skepticism leads to a decision whose repercussions will echo down the decades.

Based on the real story of a reform school that operated for 111 years and warped the lives of thousands of children, The Nickel Boys is a devastating, driven narrative that showcases a great American novelist writing at the height of his powers and “should further cement Whitehead as one of his generation's best" (Entertainment Weekly).
Look for Colson Whitehead’s bestselling new novel, Harlem Shuffle!
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Product: Free Spirits: The Story of Jack Ruffin and the Underground Railroad
Description: ‘Free Spirits’ is the story of West Point Cadet Jack Ruffin who was brought up in Boston as the son of a judge, passed as white and went to the best schools. He spent his summers on the family plantation where he formed an inexplicably deep bond with Lucy, a domestic slave in his uncle’s household.

As with many pre-Civil War households, all is not as it seems. Upon the death of Judge Ruffin, his ‘father’, he discovers the truth. Lucy is his mother, having given him away at birth under impossible circumstances.

The action starts in 1859 when Jack enlists the aid of the Underground Railroad, the secret network designed and constructed to rescue slaves.

The reader moves between black and white worlds. The world of slavery, slave markets, free blacks (Freedmen) and the Underground Railroad. The world of white society (North and South) peopled by Oliver Wendell Holmes, Ralph Waldo Emerson and his daughter Ellen, with whom Jack is in love. The world of planters, slave traders, slave catchers and the Patrol whose job it was to keep the slaves in their place.

The action revolves around the struggle between the Underground Railroad and the Patrol. The book introduces the reader to the pre-American Civil War South, its people and traditions, from the point of view of those resisting slavery and the institutions (formal and informal) which nourished it.

You meet Grace, a Harriet Tubman-like figure who is the founder of several branches of the Underground Railroad. You meet Tracker, Graces’ eyes and ears. You will see them operate in hostile territory in the bid to assist Jack in securing his mother’s freedom. You will meet the members of the Patrol and see their methods, their desperate and casual cruelty as they struggle to keep slaves in bondage and rush against time to thwart Jack.

Through Jack, you see all these worlds as if for the first time in fast-paced action as it rushes to its dramatic and heart-rending conclusion.
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Product: Battlefield America: The War On The American People
Brand: Select Books (NY)
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Product: Beneath a Scarlet Sky: A Novel
Brand: Lake Union Publishing
Soon to be a major motion picture from Pascal Pictures, starring Tom Holland. Based on the true story of a forgotten hero, the #1 Amazon Charts bestseller Beneath a Scarlet Sky is the triumphant, epic tale of one young man’s incredible courage and resilience during one of history’s darkest hours.
Pino Lella wants nothing to do with the war or the Nazis. He’s a normal Italian teenager—obsessed with music, food, and girls—but his days of innocence are numbered. When his family home in Milan is destroyed by Allied bombs, Pino joins an underground railroad helping Jews escape over the Alps, and falls for Anna, a beautiful widow six years his senior.
In an attempt to protect him, Pino’s parents force him to enlist as a German soldier—a move they think will keep him out of combat. But after Pino is injured, he is recruited at the tender age of eighteen to become the personal driver for Adolf Hitler’s left hand in Italy, General Hans Leyers, one of the Third Reich’s most mysterious and powerful commanders.
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Product: Girl, Woman, Other: A Novel (Booker Prize Winner)
Description: NATIONAL BESTSELLER
WINNER OF THE BOOKER PRIZE

“A must-read about modern Britain and womanhood . . . An impressive, fierce novel about the lives of black British families, their struggles, pains, laughter, longings and loves . . . Her style is passionate, razor-sharp, brimming with energy and humor. There is never a single moment of dullness in this book and the pace does not allow you to turn away from its momentum.” —Booker Prize Judges

Bernardine Evaristo is the winner of the 2019 Booker Prize and the first black woman to receive this highest literary honor in the English language. Girl, Woman, Other is a magnificent portrayal of the intersections of identity and a moving and hopeful story of an interconnected group of Black British women that paints a vivid portrait of the state of contemporary Britain and looks back to the legacy of Britain’s colonial history in Africa and the Caribbean.

The twelve central characters of this multi-voiced novel lead vastly different lives: Amma is a newly acclaimed playwright whose work often explores her Black lesbian identity; her old friend Shirley is a teacher, jaded after decades of work in London’s funding-deprived schools; Carole, one of Shirley’s former students, is a successful investment banker; Carole’s mother Bummi works as a cleaner and worries about her daughter’s lack of rootedness despite her obvious achievements. From a nonbinary social media influencer to a 93-year-old woman living on a farm in Northern England, these unforgettable characters also intersect in shared aspects of their identities, from age to race to sexuality to class.

Sparklingly witty and filled with emotion, centering voices we often see othered, and written in an innovative fast-moving form that borrows technique from poetry, Girl, Woman, Other is a polyphonic and richly textured social novel that shows a side of Britain we rarely see, one that reminds us of all that connects us to our neighbors, even in times when we are encouraged to be split apart.
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Product: Between the World and Me
Brand: One World
Color: White
#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER | NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER | NAACP IMAGE AWARD WINNER | PULITZER PRIZE FINALIST | NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD FINALIST | NAMED ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The New York Times Book Review  O: The Oprah Magazine  The Washington Post  People  Entertainment Weekly  Vogue  Los Angeles Times  San Francisco Chronicle  Chicago Tribune  New York  Newsday  Library Journal  Publishers Weekly
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Product: The Yellow House: A Memoir (2019 National Book Award Winner)
Brand: Grove Press
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Product: The Underground Railroad: A Novel
Brand: Anchor
Color: Red
softcover
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Product: Zone One
Brand: Anchor
Color: Purple
Anchor Books
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Product: Sag Harbor
Brand: Anchor
Color: Multicolor
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Product: A Gentleman in Moscow: A Novel
Brand: Penguin Books
Color: Multicolor
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Product: The Border: A Novel (Power of the Dog, 3)
Brand: William Morrow & Company
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Product: The Colossus of New York
Brand: Anchor
Color: Black
Anchor
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