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More information is at slh Duluth.com slash baby.

Hi, podcast listeners. It's Anne here. One of this falls big books, maybe the biggest, is Colson Whitehead's sweeping new historical novel about the Underground Railroad.

It's an unflinching look at the experience of slavery, and it's hard to forget. It was also hard to write.

It was terrible, and I had to galvanize myself to start writing once I had amassed all this material and realized the terrible time I was going to put Cora and all the other characters through just in order to make a realistic plantation.

But once I found a narrative voice that worked, a register that allowed for brutality, reality and philosophy, I was able to push on.

And, you know, my office is in the basement of our house and we have two floors and I could always,

even though I was doing with very difficult material all day, you know, come 3 p.m. I come upstairs and rejoin a family and could be a human again, yes.

Critics have welcomed the Underground Railroad with over-the-top praise.

In fact, it's just been long listed for a National Book Award.

Now, in Colson's imagination, the Underground Railroad is an

actual Underground Railroad complete with locomotives and box cars and conductors. So it's

partly an alternative history. But the characters themselves were inspired by real history,

the classic slave narratives of Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs.

In this story, a young slave named Cora grows up on a brutal plantation in Georgia,

and another slave named Caesar urges her to escape.

And so Cora heads north, with slave catchers on her heels looking for that underground railroad.

Here's Steve Paulson's full-length interview with Colson Whitehead, and here's how the story begins.

The first time Caesar approached Cora about running north, she said no. This was her grandmother talking.

Cora's grandmother had never seen the ocean before that bright afternoon in the port of Weta,

and the water dazzled after her time in the fort's dungeon. The dungeon stored them until

the ships arrived. Dahomean raiders kidnapped the men first, then returned to her village the next moon for

...