VIDEO: Audiobook Narrator Bahni Turpin reads from THE UNDERGROUND RAILROAD at the National Book Awards Finalists Reading

By Jennifer Rubins | February 28 2017 | Community Reads

On the evening before the National Book Awards ceremony, The New School hosts a reading with the finalists in the categories of Poetry, Fiction, Nonfiction, and Young People’s Literature. In 2016, audiobook narrator Bahni Turpin read an excerpt of the National Book Award Winner THE UNDERGROUND RAILROAD on behalf of author Colson Whitehead.
Watch her beautiful reading below.

 

Audio Praise for THE UNDERGROUND RAILROAD:
“Turpin’s performance of this intense, imaginative, and grim odyssey makes it feel disturbingly real.”—Booklist, starred review

“Turpin’s faultless, fully-voiced narration embodies authentic dialects and accents; her sonorous, dramatic tone and commanding presence intensify the somber power of the author’s words.”
—RUSA Listen List

“Audiobook fans will certainly not be disappointed by versatile actor Turpin’s performance of Whitehead’s powerful historical novel…Turpin manages to shift between the ages, races, and accents of the large cast of characters with remarkable ease. Her turn as Cora mesmerizes…”—Publishers Weekly, starred review

“Narrator Bahni Turpin is able to differentiate among the many characters and lends a flowing cadence to the dark and savage tale.”—Library Journal

The Underground Railroad (Oprah's Book Club)
A Novel
978-1-5247-3625-5
#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • PULITZER PRIZE WINNER • NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER • A magnificent tour de force chronicling a young slave's adventures as she makes a desperate bid for freedom in the antebellum South. • Now an original Amazon Prime Video series directed by Barry Jenkins. Cora is a slave on a cotton plantation in Georgia. Life is hell for all the slaves, but especially bad for Cora; an outcast even among her fellow Africans, she is coming into womanhood—where even greater pain awaits. When Caesar, a recent arrival from Virginia, tells her about the Underground Railroad, they decide to take a terrifying risk and escape. Matters do not go as planned—Cora kills a young white boy who tries to capture her. Though they manage to find a station and head north, they are being hunted.In Whitehead’s ingenious conception, the Underground Railroad is no mere metaphor—engineers and conductors operate a secret network of tracks and tunnels beneath the Southern soil. Cora and Caesar’s first stop is South Carolina, in a city that initially seems like a haven. But the city’s placid surface masks an insidious scheme designed for its black denizens. And even worse: Ridgeway, the relentless slave catcher, is close on their heels. Forced to flee again, Cora embarks on a harrowing flight, state by state, seeking true freedom.Like the protagonist of Gulliver’s Travels, Cora encounters different worlds at each stage of her journey—hers is an odyssey through time as well as space. As Whitehead brilliantly re-creates the unique terrors for black people in the pre–Civil War era, his narrative seamlessly weaves the saga of America from the brutal importation of Africans to the unfulfilled promises of the present day. The Underground Railroad is at once a kinetic adventure tale of one woman’s ferocious will to escape the horrors of bondage and a shattering, powerful meditation on the history we all share.Look for Colson Whitehead’s new novel, Crook Manifesto, coming soon!
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