Following his success with “The Underground Railroad”, Colson Whitehead again mixes real history with his expansive imagination to create a new chronicle of the Black experience in America, called “The Nickel Boys”. Both novels have won the coveted US Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Based on an actual, so-called reform school for boys in Florida, opened at the end of the 19th century, “The Nickel Boys” is mostly set in the 1960s, and follows the fate of Elwood Curtis, raised by his grandmother Harriet after his parents absconded to California. Growing up in the heat of the civil rights movement, he is bolstered by Harriet’s strict, but loving care and inspired by the writings of Martin Luther King. Harriet believes that one will face divine retribution for trying to surpass one’s station in life, but Elwood nonetheless begins to participate in protest marches. He self-educates himself alongside regular school, and a sympathetic teacher has just arranged for him to attend free classes at a nearby college when a cruel twist of fate lands him in the Nickel Academy for Boys instead.