If there’s one thing they understand, these church folks, it’s wailing and lamentation.īut I bowed my head and apologized to Father Barton for the scene I’d caused.

Here we were, breaking bread together, the gentle young priest and I. Pleading for an appointment with the father. White-haired, apple-cheeked lady, sitting behind her desk at that big church up there on Meridian Street, Saint Catherine’s, and I suppose I behaved like a wild thing in her tidy little office that afternoon, gnashing my teeth and carrying on. LuEllen was the receptionist, church secretary, what have you. “I must say, you gave LuEllen quite a start.” Then, when she was gone, Father Barton talked before I could. I took a breath, but before I could speak, the waitress came over to pour our coffee and hand out the menus, and Father Barton and I went silent, smiled stiff and polite at the girl and at each other. I could feel my needfulness dripping from my brow. I could feel my thin, cheap spectacles slipping down my nose.

I was aware of how I looked: I looked pathetic. I knitted my fingers together and leaned forward across the table. “I think that I’m the man you’re looking for.” Underground Airlines is a ground-breaking novel, a wickedly imaginative thriller, and a story of an America that is more like our own than we’d like to believe. But in pursuing Jackdaw, Victor discovers secrets at the core of the country’s arrangement with the Hard Four, secrets the government will preserve at any cost. Victor believes himself to be a good man doing bad work, unwilling to give up the freedom he has worked so hard to earn. But his strange, increasingly uncanny pursuit is complicated by a boss who won’t reveal the extraordinary stakes of Jackdaw’s case, as well as by a heartbreaking young woman and her child - who may be Victor’s salvation. In this version of America, slavery continues in four states called “the Hard Four.” On the trail of a runaway known as Jackdaw, Victor arrives in Indianapolis knowing that something isn’t right - with the case file, with his work, and with the country itself.Īs he works to infiltrate the local cell of a abolitionist movement called the Underground Airlines, tracking Jackdaw through the back rooms of churches, empty parking garages, hotels, and medical offices, Victor believes he’s hot on the trail. Louis Post-Dispatch, Kirkus Reviews, AudioFile Magazine, and AmazonĪ young black man calling himself Victor has struck a bargain with federal law enforcement, working as a bounty hunter for the US Marshall Service in exchange for his freedom. The bestselling book that asks the question: what would present-day America look like if the Civil War never happened?Ī New York Times bestseller a Goodreads Choice finalist named one of the Best Books of the Year by NPR, Slate, Publishers Weekly, Hudson Bookseller, St.

Underground airlines by ben h winters