The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead

 

I expect it's something of a known fact that award-winning fiction and I don't often get along well. This is emphatically an exception. The conceit here is that the Underground Railroad in this novel is not a metaphorical railroad, something you'd get from the cover copy. It's pretty linear, as modern vaguely-literary fiction goes, with just a few short threads from someone other than the POV protag, some of which happen out of their place in the novel's timeline; but it is not an easy read--though the horrors of chattel slavery are not literally shoved into the reader's face on every page, there is not a word of this novel that is not steeped in them. Graceful and brutal and eventually overwhelmingly bittersweet, survival is the happiest ending available.