Underground Airlines (Winters)

Book Reviews
Ben H. Winters’s chilling new thriller....tackles the thorny subject of racial injustice in America. It takes place in a contemporary United States where the Civil War never happened, and slavery remains legal in four states, and it’s narrated by a former slave who has paid a steep moral price for his freedom.... Attica Locke, a mystery novelist and a writer for the television show Empire, said she was taken aback at first when she picked up the book.... "For me, as a black writer, I have to be like, ‘What’s Ben trying to do here?" Then she got sucked into the story and was "blown away," she said.
Alexandra Alter - New York Times


[A] terrifying conceit at its heart...[t]he book is set in a country that largely resembles the contemporary United States....  A little past its halfway point this novel takes a surprising, but wholly necessary turn, directing Victor and the reader straight into the darkness that persists in [the remaining] four slaveholding states.... [Yet the] he novel succeeds so well in part because its fiction is disturbingly close to our present reality.... Winters has written a book that will make you see the world in a new light.
Jon Michaud - Washington Post


Underground Airlines will start a lot of conversations. A lot.... Most readers will happily overlook [some of] the cookie-cutter details as they'll be caught up in the alternate nation the author has created, one in which...some states have old-fashioned towns that keep Jim Crow statutes. If the denouement comes too late for us to care, well, we've learned along the way that this alternate nation...is ugly and evil.
Bethanne Patrick - NPR.org


(Starred review.) Ralph Ellison’s The Invisible Man meets Blade Runner in this outstanding alternate history thriller..... The novel’s closing section contains several breathtaking reversals, a genuinely disturbing revelation, and an exhilarating final course of action for Victor.
Publishers Weekly


(Starred review.) In this alternative history, President Abraham Lincoln is assassinated en route to his inauguration. His death leads legislators to come together with one last proposal to keep the Union intact.... Explosive, well plotted, and impossible to put down.
Library Journal

 For the most part, Winters neatly blends dystopian fiction with old-fashioned procedural.... If it lacks all the dramatic punch it might have had... [it's] smart and well paced. The story could use a little fine-tuning, but it moves deftly from a terrific premise and builds to a satisfying conclusion.
Kirkus Reviews