The Nickel Boys

Colson Whitehead's novel is based on the Dozier School for Boys, a reform school in Florida where hundreds of Black boys were tortured and killed over decades. Following Elwood Curtis, a Black teenager committed to the school in the 1960s, the novel strips away the myth of American progress to expose the continuity of racial violence. It won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction in 2020.