Oprah's Book Club's latest pick: "The Underground Railroad"
In a new collaboration with the Oprah Winfrey Network (OWN) and O, The Oprah Magazine, "CBS This Morning" revealed that New York Times bestselling author Colson Whitehead's new work, "The Underground Railroad," would be the club's next read.
"Race is one of the things I write about... But slavery, I've avoided it for a long time. It seemed a very daunting subject," Whitehead said Tuesday on "CBS This Morning." "I first came up with the idea of the book 16 years ago. I was sitting on my couch, and I think a lot of people when they first hear about the Underground Railroad, when they're a kid, they think it's a literal subway, and then you hear about it's not, and you're sort of disappointed. So, I was thinking, what if the Underground Railroad actually was a literal railroad? And took it from there. That's a premise, it's not really a story, so I kept thinking about it. And I was thinking, what if every state are protagonists, goes through as he or she goes north, is a different state of American possibility? And so, it became sort of Gulliver's travel type structure."
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/oprahs-book-club-the-underground-railroad-by-colson-whitehead/
I have to pick this one up!
= new reply since forum marked as read
Even before Oprah announced it as her pick 
(Got an advanced reader copy through a friend in the biz)
He does a really good job at writing what feels like an entirely realistic style book while you read it, yet the flourishes of the railroad being literal and certain other ways of playing with the timing and locations of close-to-truth historical events make it more of a 'speculative' fiction piece, almost magical realism... but you barely notice that when you're reading.
Very well written, powerful, page-turning book.