Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer prize-winning novel opens with the dreadful discovery of human bones in Florida, at a web site slated for a brand new shopping center. A long time earlier, the land had been dwelling to the Nickel Academy, a jail reform college within the Jim Crow period the place Black boys had been brutalised and, in some circumstances, murdered by employees.
The story then shifts again to the early Sixties and tells of Elwood Curtis, a hard-working boy who has been raised by his grandmother and who, impressed by Martin Luther King, has ambitions to elevate himself out of his modest beginnings and do one thing nice. However circumstances conspire to maintain him down when he’s accused of stealing a automobile and despatched to the Nickel Academy for indefinite detention, a spot the place boys are taken “out again” and infrequently don’t return.
The voice actor JD Jackson is the narrator, delivering Whitehead’s prose with chilling understatement. The Nickel Boys, which has been tailored for a forthcoming movie starring Ethan Herisse and Brandon Wilson, relies on a real-life story and a darkish chapter in America’s racist previous: that of the notorious Dozier College for Boys in Marianna, Florida, which operated for over 100 years and the place the graves of scores of Black kids had been uncovered.
For Whitehead’s Elwood, life on the Nickel Academy is a matter of survival. There, together with his pal, Turner, he resolves to not be crushed by the varsity’s sadistic strictures.
Little, Brown Audio, 6hr, 46min
Additional listening
The Kellerby Code
Jonny Candy, Bolinda Audio, 10hr 57min
Jack Davenport reads this Saltburn-esque story of the narrator’s effort to slot in together with his aristocratic new pals, with terrifying penalties.
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I Haven’t Been Completely Trustworthy With You
Miranda Hart, Penguin Audio, 10hr 9min
The comic and actor reads her guide for surviving continual sickness, based mostly on her years dwelling with undiagnosed Lyme illness.
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