The Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead

Colson Whitehead had a tough job following up The Underground Railroad, his “once-in-a-generation slave-era fantasia” that won “pretty much every accolade going” in 2016, said Johanna Thomas-Corr in The Sunday Times. Its successor, however, is “another triumph”. Set in the segregated “Jim Crow South” of the early 1960s, it centres on a brutal reform school for juveniles – The Nickel Academy – to which Elwood Curtis, a black straight-A student, is sent after erroneously being arrested for car theft.

Whitehead’s academy is closely modelled on an actual institution, the Dozier School in Florida, where unmarked graves were discovered in 2014, said Tim Adams in The Observer. His portrayal of its “enclosed world” – with its endemic racism and punishment block dubbed the White House – is “both highly detailed and emotionally exacting”. Yet, despite being rooted in fact, this is “not just a piece of documentary writing”, said Philip Hensher in The Spectator. Instead, it finds its justification in a “marvellous play” between reality and artifice. It is, quite simply, “heartbreakingly good”.