Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer prize-winning novel opens with the dreadful discovery of human bones in Florida, at a site slated for a new shopping mall. Decades earlier, the land had been home to the Nickel Academy, a prison reform school in the Jim Crow era where Black boys had been brutalised and, in some cases, murdered by staff.
The story then shifts back to the early 1960s and tells of Elwood Curtis, a hard-working boy who has been raised by his grandmother and who, inspired by Martin Luther King, has ambitions to lift himself out of his modest beginnings and do something great. But circumstances conspire to keep him down when he is accused of stealing a car and sent to the Nickel Academy for indefinite detention, a place where boys are taken “out back” and often don’t return.
