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The Nickel Boys: Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction 2020
Colson Whitehead
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Description for The Nickel Boys: Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction 2020
Paperback.
'RaMell Ross's transcendentally moving and frightening film' (Guardian, New York Film Festival) on UK cinema release 8th November 2025
WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE FOR FICTION 2020
WINNER OF THE ORWELL PRIZE FOR POLITICAL FICTION 2020
Winner of the Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction 2020
Time #1 Novel of the Year 2019
Author of The Underground Railroad, Colson Whitehead brilliantly dramatizes another strand of American history through the story of two boys sentenced to a hellish reform school in 1960s Florida.
Elwood Curtis has taken the words of Dr Martin Luther King to heart: he ... Read moreis as good as anyone. Abandoned by his parents, brought up by his loving, strict and clear-sighted grandmother, Elwood is about to enroll in the local black college. But given the time and the place, one innocent mistake is enough to destroy his future, and so Elwood arrives at The Nickel Academy, which claims to provide 'physical, intellectual and moral training' which will equip its inmates to become 'honorable and honest men'.
In reality, the Nickel Academy is a chamber of horrors, where physical, emotional and sexual abuse is rife, where corrupt officials and tradesmen do a brisk trade in supplies intended for the school, and where any boy who resists is likely to disappear 'out back'. Stunned to find himself in this vicious environment, Elwood tries to hold on to Dr King's ringing assertion, 'Throw us in jail, and we will still love you.' But Elwood's fellow inmate and new friend Turner thinks Elwood is naive and worse; the world is crooked, and the only way to survive is to emulate the cruelty and cynicism of their oppressors.
The tension between Elwood's idealism and Turner's skepticism leads to a decision which will have decades-long repercussions.
Based on the history of a real reform school in Florida that operated for one hundred and eleven years and warped and destroyed the lives of thousands of children, The Nickel Boys is a devastating, driven narrative by a great American novelist whose work is essential to understanding the current reality of the United States.
'If greatness is excellence sustained over time, then without question, Whitehead is one of the greatest of his generation. In fact, figuring his age, acclaim, productivity and consistency, he is one of the greatest American writers alive' Time
'A commanding triumph' Sunday Times
'Every chapter hits its mark' New York Times
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Product Details
Place of Publication
London, United Kingdom
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About Colson Whitehead
Colson Whitehead is a multi-award winning and bestselling author whose works include The Nickel Boys, The Underground Railroad, The Noble Hustle, Zone One, Sag Harbor, The Intuitionist, John Henry Days, Apex Hides the Hurt and a collection of essays, The Colossus of New York. He is one of only four novelists to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction twice and ... Read moreis a recipient of MacArthur and Guggenheim fellowships. For The Underground Railroad, Whitehead won the National Book Award, the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, the Arthur C. Clarke Award for Fiction, the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence and was longlisted for the Booker Prize. He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for a second time for The Nickel Boys, which also won the George Orwell Prize for Political Fiction and The Kirkus Prize. The Underground Railroad has been adapted as an Amazon Prime TV series, produced and directed by the Academy Award winning director Barry Jenkins, and was broadcast in 2021. He lives with his family in New York City. Show Less
Reviews for The Nickel Boys: Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction 2020
From the award-winning author of The Underground Railroad comes another searing novel exploring America's racially troubled past . . . a real page-turner
Mail on Sunday
A commanding triumph . . . brilliant and furious . . . a lean, commanding page turner that provides the richest fictional experience of 2019 so far . . . the prose ... Read moreis so loaded with quicksilver wit, it holds you in its thrall. It is a novel that not only succeeds in character, plot and moral argument but lends grace to lives all too easily shattered . . . The compressed fury of Whitehead's writing is what propels the novel forward - he is one of only a handful of writers who is so brilliant you just want to feed him stories. He has a distinctive voice, at once cynical and compassionate, and his wry observations cut to the quick in ways that make other novelists look prissy or too anxious to please. There is barely a paragraph of The Nickel Boys without some felicitous touch
Sunday Times
[Whitehead] has produced yet another modern classic . . . He's also adept at creating characters of unforgettable flesh-and-blood immediacy, with even the swiftest pen portrait conveying the full weight of a lived history. Quietly and purposefully heartbreaking in its portrayal of the lifelong legacy of abuse, it is quite outstanding
Stephanie Cross
Daily Mail
Forceful and tightly wrought . . . Whitehead homes in on the way in which every action fits into a fully orchestrated whole, which is why I would wish everyone, black or white, to read this novel. He demonstrates to superb effect how racism in America has long operated as a codified and sanctioned activity intended to enrich one group at the expense of another
Guardian
If greatness is excellence sustained over time, then without question, Whitehead is one of the greatest of his generation. In fact, figuring his age, acclaim, productivity and consistency, he is one of the greatest American writers alive
Time
There's hardly a spare word in this book . . . Whitehead has a talent for creating ambiguous, complex scenes that fix in your memory. The Nickel Boys feels like a necessary fictional project, writing the blank or buried pages of US history; and it's done with virtuosity
Evening Standard
A furious, compassionate novel whose final sleight of hand will twist deep in your gut
Claire Allfree
Metro
A masterful piece of very human storytelling
Nikesh Shukla
i
Colson Whitehead's book is not a polemic, but in presenting the unconscionable history of this particular institution, keeping boys in solitary confinement or even burying them "out the back", he once again builds an allegorical history that resonates in the present
Tim Adams
Observer
Whitehead renders a terrifying world in disarming terms, lovingly guiding his reader to recognize the lasting impact of a cruel era
Time
Searing . . . the story is masterfully told
Duncan White
Telegraph
if there's a more powerful novel this year, I'd be very surprised
Reader's Digest
A tense, nervy performance, even more rigorously controlled than its predecessor. The narration is disciplined and the sentences plain and sturdy, oars cutting into the water. Every chapter hits its mark
New York Times
Whitehead wields his mastery over character and narrative in service of dramatising the Jim Crow era to piercing effect, following the lives of two boys sentenced to a brutal reform school in 1960s Florida
Time magazine (Best books of the decade)
The Nickel Boys is in conversation with works by James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison and especially Martin Luther King . . . It shreds our easy confidence in the triumph of goodness and leaves in its place a hard and bitter truth about the ongoing American experiment
Washington Post
Haunting and haunted . . . devastating . . . The book feels like a mission, and it's an essential one . . . he pulls off a brilliant sleight of hand that elevates the mere act of resurrecting Elwood's buried story into at once a miracle and a tragedy
New York Times Book Review
[The Nickel Boys] has the hot breath of a true story. It also has a beautiful, unforgettable young hero who walks right off the page into your heart . . . If you have been thinking you should read Colson Whitehead, The Nickel Boys is the perfect place to start
Newsweek
The best American novel I read this year was The Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead, a story of courage, cruelty and perversion, set in a Southern reform school in the early 1960s. Not comfortable reading, but compelling
Allan Massie
Scotsman
Whitehead's most emotionally resonant novel to date . . . he allows us to feel, and to ache, too
Times Literary Supplement
What elevates Whitehead's treatment of race and American brutality is the elegance of its style and the satisfying inventiveness of its form
Spectator
Whitehead lays bare the brutality of recent US history and the legacy its victims carry to the bitter end
Financial Times
The Nickel Boys lifts the lid on the racist brutality of reform schools in the Jim Crow-era south
Guardian
A masterful novel . . . will floor you
Daily Mail
Not a moment is wasted, and for someone who writes as vividly as Whitehead, there's also a graceful economy here. He uses words carefully, as if he doesn't want them to get in the way of the truths he's excavating
Boston Globe
Whitehead's brilliant examination of America's history of violence is a stunning novel of impeccable language and startling insight
Publishers Weekly
Spare and unforgettable
Ann Patchett
Sunday Telegraph
Tackles a subject more recent than slavery but just as heart-wrenching . . . Based on a true story, The Nickel Boys is a haunting account of young lives whose promise was cut cruelly short
Daily Mail
As extraordinary as everyone says
Richard Osman
Guardian
Heartbreaking, but also very gripping
Nick Hornby
Good Housekeeping
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