The Nickel Boys

Elwood Curtis is a serious, idealistic Black teenager in early-1960s Tallahassee, raised on his grandmother's values and the speeches of Martin Luther King Jr., when a case of mistaken circumstance gets him sentenced to the Nickel Academy, a reform school. What looks on paper like a chance at rehabilitation is in practice a brutal, racially segregated institution where boys disappear and the staff answer to no one.

Elwood's idealism collides directly with Turner, another boy at Nickel whose survival strategy is built on cynicism and keeping his head down. Whitehead alternates between the boys' experience at the school and a later timeline following one of them into adulthood, building toward a revelation about what actually happened at Nickel.

Whitehead based the novel on the real history of the Arthur G. Dozier School for Boys in Florida, where unmarked graves were discovered decades after the school's closure. The Nickel Boys won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.