1. The Nickel Boys
Colson Whitehead's follow-up to the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Underground Railroad has recently earned its own Pulitzer for its brilliant dramatisation of another strand of American history through the story of two boys sentenced to a horrific reformatory school in Florida, the Nickel Academy.
African-American Elwood Curtis, born in 1960s Tallahassee, was unfairly sentenced to a juvenile reform school and found himself trapped in a grotesque chamber of horrors. The only thing keeping him from The Nickel Academy's living hell is the friendship he has formed with fellow detainee Turner.
Inspired by the true story of a reform school that has been operating for over a century, this novel is a devastating narrative that showcases a great American novelist writing at the height of his powers.
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