Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, Coleson Whitehead’s most hard-hitting narrative to date, and perhaps his most fundamental. The story rings especially true because of recent national attention on present-day racial cruelty and violence; the happenstance of Elwood Curtis’s turn of fate, and his experience of a Florida black boys’ reform school in the ‘60s is all the more powerful for its plausibility. Most skillfully, the author’s deft, fluid exposition of atrocities committed upon the boys in this story cuts like a knife.  Whitehead doesn’t freight the profound nature of his novel’s situation with a rescuing sentiment, so the reader feels the real weight of the events for its subjects. After reading this unforgettable story, you may feel compelled to exhume more buried bodies of our shared racial past, and also read more of the memorable fiction by Colson Whitehead.