The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead is my pick for the book of the year. When Whitehead made his debut in 1999 with The Intuitionist, he was praised for his ingenuity: After all, who thinks up a novel about elevator inspectors and race? The Underground Railroad, set in antebellum America, is every bit as imaginative, while its vision of the surreal insanity of racism is even more devastating.

Whitehead's premise is that the Underground Railroad was an actual network of trains running beneath the soil of the American South. His story follows an enslaved woman named Cora in flight from a plantation in Georgia.

Whitehead's novel bows to other great African-American writers — from Harriet Jacobs to Ralph Ellison — who've chronicled a variety of similar journeys. Yet, even in so doing, Whitehead's Underground Railroad is one of a kind.