NEW YORK Situations BESTSELLER

ONE OF TIME MAGAZINE’S 10 Top FICTION BOOKS FROM THE DECADE

WINNER OF THE KIRKUS PRIZE

LONGLISTED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD

In this bravura follow-up to the Pulitzer Prize, and Country wide Book Award-winning #1 New York Situations bestseller The Underground Railroad, Colson Whitehead brilliantly dramatizes another strand of American history through the story of two guys sentenced to a hellish reform school in Jim Crow-era Florida.

As the Civil Rights motion begins to about The Nickel Boys: A Novel reach the black enclave of Frenchtown in segregated Tallahassee, Elwood Curtis takes what of Dr. Martin Luther King to heart: He is ‘as great as anyone.’ Abandoned by his parents, but continued the direct and slim by his grandmother, Elwood is going to enroll in the neighborhood dark college. But also for a black youngster in the Jim Crow South of the first 1960s, one innocent mistake is enough to destroy the future. Elwood is normally sentenced to a juvenile reformatory known as the Nickel Academy, whose mission statement says it provides ‘physical, intellectual and moral training’ so the delinquent young boys in their charge may become ‘honorable and honest men.’

In reality, the Nickel Academy is a grotesque chamber of horrors where in fact the sadistic staff beats and sexually abuses the learners, corrupt officials and locals steal food and supplies, and any boy who resists will probably disappear ‘out back.’ Stunned to find himself in that vicious environment, Elwood tries to carry onto Dr. King’s buzzing assertion ‘Throw us in jail and we will still love you.’ His friend Turner feels Elwood is normally worse than naive, the world can be crooked, which the only path to survive can be to scheme and steer clear of trouble.

The tension between Elwood’s ideals and Turner’s skepticism prospects to a decision whose repercussions will echo down the decades. Produced in the crucible from the evils Jim Crow wrought, the young boys’ fates will become determined by what they endured on the Nickel Academy.

Based on the real story of a reform school in Florida that operated for just one hundred and eleven years and warped the lives of a large number of children, The Nickel Boys can be a devastating, driven narrative that showcases an excellent American novelist composing in the height of his powers.