Something new is rolling into the city of Boston, like fog off the harbor. Fourteen-year-old Lucy Bradford can feel it in her bones: a sensation that things may not be as they seem.
Hundreds of miles south, a girl named Afrika is fleeing from a cruel world. Her guide: the North Star. Afrika has known lifetimes of hardship and brutality, though she's only Lucy's age. And she's willing to face death for a chance at freedom.
A movement underground will soon change both their lives. It is a movement to help Afrika, and others, escape north to a world without slavery, a movement that will call Lucy into its ranks. It is called the Underground Railroad, and on it, Afrika and Lucy will discover together where their destinies lie: true north.
In this gripping and thoroughly researched novel, award-winning writer Kathryn Lasky weaves a compelling story about two young women - an abolitionist's granddaughter and a fugitive slave girl whose lives intersect on the Underground Railroad in 1858.