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.
The voice actor JD Jackson is the narrator, delivering Whitehead’s prose with chilling understatement. The Nickel Boys, which has been adapted for a forthcoming film starring Ethan Herisse and Brandon Wilson, is based on a real-life story and a dark chapter in America’s racist past: that of the infamous Dozier School for Boys in Marianna, Florida, which operated for over 100 years and where the graves of scores of Black children were uncovered.
For Whitehead’s Elwood, life at the Nickel Academy is a matter of survival. There, with his friend, Turner, he resolves not to be crushed by the school’s sadistic strictures.
Little, Brown Audio, 6hr, 46min
Further listening
The Kellerby Code
Jonny Sweet, Bolinda Audio, 10hr 57min
Jack Davenport reads this Saltburn-esque tale of the narrator’s effort to fit in with his aristocratic new chums, with terrifying consequences.
I Haven’t Been Entirely Honest With You
Miranda Hart, Penguin Audio, 10hr 9min
The comedian and actor reads her manual for surviving chronic illness, based on her years living with undiagnosed Lyme disease.
