Recommendations
Books Like The Underground Railroad
A literal train beneath the American South and the range of freedom's possibilities
If The Underground Railroad gripped you — the fantastical literalism of the trains, the alternative-history states, Cora's determination, the way history keeps arriving in new forms — these eight novels share its portrait of slavery's aftermath, its formal invention, or its preoccupation with what freedom actually means.
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Beloved
by Toni Morrison
Sethe haunted by the ghost of her murdered daughter — Morrison's Nobel Prize-winning novel is the most powerful literary precursor to The Underground Railroad: the same insistence on the interiority of enslaved people, the same use of the supernatural to make slavery's trauma legible, and the same refusal to let emancipation be a clean break; where Whitehead's Cora escapes, Morrison's Sethe does something to her daughter that the novel cannot quite name until you are ready to understand it
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The Nickel Boys
by Colson Whitehead
Elwood Curtis, a Black teenager in 1960s Florida, sent to a reform school where abuse has been institutionalized behind a facade of rehabilitation — Whitehead's second Pulitzer Prize winner; shares The Underground Railroad's preoccupation with the specific American institutions built to oppress Black people, but in a realistic mode rather than a fantastical one; the obvious next Whitehead read
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Homegoing
by Yaa Gyasi
Two sisters in 1750s Ghana — one who marries a British slave trader, one who is sold into slavery — and their descendants across eight generations — Gyasi's debut traces the full arc of the Atlantic slave trade and its aftermath; where Whitehead compresses the history of American racism into a single journey, Gyasi expands it across generations and two continents
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Washington Black
by Esi Edugyan
George Washington Black, a Barbadian field slave who escapes in a hot-air balloon in 1830 and travels the world — Edugyan's Booker-shortlisted novel shares The Underground Railroad's use of a fantastical conceit to take the reader through the geography of Caribbean slavery; where Whitehead's trains are an alternative history of American infrastructure, Edugyan's balloon is an individual escape that discovers freedom's complications
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Kindred
by Octavia Butler
Dana, a Black woman in 1970s California, repeatedly pulled back in time to a Maryland plantation — Butler's science fiction masterpiece established the genre of neo-slave narrative that Whitehead works in; the literal time travel is the ancestor of Whitehead's literal underground railroad, and both novels use the fantastical conceit to make the present responsible for the past
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Twelve Years a Slave
by Solomon Northup
Solomon Northup's 1853 memoir of his kidnapping from freedom and twelve years of enslavement in Louisiana — the nonfiction foundation of the neo-slave narrative tradition; reading Northup alongside Whitehead shows what the genre is drawing on and what it transforms; where Northup's account is documentary, Whitehead's is allegorical, but both are fundamentally about the same reality
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The Color Purple
by Alice Walker
Celie writing letters to God and then to her sister, slowly finding a voice — Walker's Pulitzer Prize winner is the Southern Black women's liberation story that precedes The Underground Railroad: where Cora's freedom is achieved through literal movement across the landscape, Celie's is achieved through language and community, but both novels are organized around the question of what freedom actually looks like for a Black woman in America
- 8Buy
Song of Solomon
by Toni Morrison
Macon Dead III, known as Milkman, discovering his family's history in the American South — Morrison's most structurally ambitious novel shares The Underground Railroad's use of a journey South as a discovery of suppressed history; where Cora's journey is North to freedom, Milkman's is South to origin, and together the two novels map the full compass of the Black American experience of the landscape
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