Colson Whitehead was a new name to me when The Underground Railroad won a Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. I still haven’t read what everyone tells me is a wonderful novel, but I picked up his newest book for a long flight I was taking recently. What a great choice it proved to be.

The NIckel Boys is the story of Elwood Curtis, a black boy from Florida about to launch into life when a terrible yet common miscarriage of justice propels him into the Nickel Academy, a segregated “reform school”.  The central part of the novel recounts Curtis’s efforts to survive the institution’s brutal regime and his attempt to live up to Martin Luther King’s call, “Throw us in jail, and we will still love you”.

Those of us who have never experienced the cruelties and injustices, large and small, of persistent racism, can only read a novel like this in a state of rage and sadness. Colson Whitehead’s calm, measured prose – never exaggerated, never overstated – only makes those feelings more intense. Part of the deep resonance of The Nickel Boys is the terrible recognition it evokes of how little has changed in America in recent decades.