"Terrific." --Barack Obama
"An American masterpiece." --NPR
"Stunningly daring." --The New York Times Book Review
A triumph. --The Washington Post
"Potent. . . . Devastating. . . . Essential." --Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times
"Whitehead's best work and an important American novel." --The Boston Globe
"Electrifying. . . . Tense, graphic, uplifting and informed, this is a story to share and remember." --People
"Heart-stopping." --Oprah Winfrey
"The Underground Railroad is inquiring into the very soul of American democracy. . . . A stirring exploration of theAmerican experiment." --The Wall Street Journal
"A brilliant reimagining of antebellum America."--The New Republic
"Colson Whitehead's book blends the fanciful and the horrific, the deeply emotional and the coolly intellectual. Whathe comes up with is an American masterpiece."--Ann Patchett, author of Bel Canto
"The Underground Railroad enters the pantheon of . . . the Great American Novels. . . . A wonderful reminder of whatgreat literature is supposed to do: open our eyes, challengeus, and leave us changed by the end." --Esquire
"[Whitehead] is the best living American novelist."--Chicago Tribune
"Masterful, urgent. . . . One of the finest novels written aboutour country's still unabsolved original sin." --USA Today
"Brilliant. . . . An instant classic that makes vivid the darkest, most horrific corners of America's history of brutality against black people." --HuffPost
"Singular, utterly riveting. . . . You'll be shaken and stunned by Whitehead's imaginative brilliance. . . . The Underground Railroad is a book both timeless and timely. It is a book for now; it is a book that is necessary." --BuzzFeed
"Whitehead is a writer of extraordinary stylistic powers. . . . [The Underground Railroad] offers many testaments to Whitehead's considerable talents and examines a deeply relevant and disturbing period of American history."--The Christian Science Monitor
"[An] ingenious novel. . . . A successful amalgam: a realistically imagined slave narrative and a crafty allegory; a tense adventure tale and a meditation on America's defining values." --Minneapolis Star Tribune
"Whitehead's novel unflinchingly turns our attention to the foundations of the America we know now." --Elle
"Perfectly balances the realism of its subject with fabulist touches that render it freshly illuminating." --Time
"I haven't been as simultaneously moved and entertained bya book for many years. This is a luminous, furious, wildly inventive tale that not only shines a bright light on one of the darkest periods of history, but also opens up thrilling new vistas for the form of the novel itself."--Alex Preston, The Guardian