Please note: Significant plot details, including several details about the climax and the finale, are below. Some characters are significantly expanded, while others are invented entirely. Overall, the show speeds through the first half of the book and lingers in the second half that’s where most of the changes to the plot take place. But by the fourth episode, when Cora ( Thuso Mbedu) makes it to North Carolina, the show takes a marked shift away from the novel.

But otherwise, the novel is remarkably sharp and direct, with a way of encapsulating awful horror and privation with just a few phrases twisted together.Īt first, Barry Jenkins’s take on The Underground Railroad is very similar to the book, with a few small details changed to simplify the proceedings. As Cora travels to the Carolinas, Tennessee, and Indiana, she seems to be traversing time as well as space. There’s an element of the fantastical to the book-in the story, the railroad is a series of real trains that run underground, ferrying escapees to ports of call. Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad, the writer’s sixth novel, is an especially taut and searing narrative, following the story of Cora, who flees slavery and a life picking cotton on the Randall plantation for a perilous journey on the mythical titular railroad. Characters often have to be combined or dropped, and narration has to be simplified or slowed down to facilitate the other medium’s unique demands.

That’s maybe the first rule of any book-to-screen adaptation, be it a biography or a short story turned into a film or a TV series.

The underground railroad book amazon