Our host for this month is Chis Benson.

Our book is “The Underground Railroad: A Novel," by Colson Whitehead.

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, this #1 New York Times bestseller chronicles a young slave's experiencs as she makes a desperate bid for freedom in the antebellum South. In Whitehead's ingenious conception, the Underground Railroad is no mere metaphor: engineers and conductors operate a secret network of actual tracks and tunnels beneath the Southern soil. Cora, a slave on a cotton plantation in Georgia, embarks on a harrowing flight from one state to the next, encountering, like Gulliver on his travels, strange yet familiar iterations of her own world at each stop.