The Underground Railroad’ is the sixth novel by American author Colson Whitehead. It is the winner of the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, the 2016 National Book Award for Fiction, the Arthur C. Clarke Award and the 2017 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence.The novel tells the story of Cora and Caesar, two slaves who make a bid for freedom from their Georgia plantations by following the Underground Railroad, which in the novel is an actual subway as opposed to a series of safe houses and secret routes.