Books like The Nickel Boys

01

The Underground Railroad

Colson Whitehead · Historical fiction

The Underground Railroad takes a central metaphor of American history — the network of safe houses and abolitionists that helped enslaved people flee north — and makes it literal: Colson Whitehead imagines the railroad as an actual underground train system, with tunnels, platforms, and conductors.

02

Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption

Bryan Stevenson · Memoir

Bryan Stevenson's memoir of his career as a capital defense attorney in Alabama, and specifically of his years working on the case of Walter McMillian — a Black man wrongly convicted of murder and sentenced to death in Monroe County, Alabama — is simultaneously a riveting legal narrative and a sustained moral argument about the American criminal justice system's treatment of the poor and of Black defendants.

03

The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness

Michelle Alexander · Politics

Michelle Alexander's central argument is stark: the United States has not ended racial caste, it has merely redesigned it.

04

Between the World and Me

Ta-Nehisi Coates · Memoir

Between the World and Me is a letter from Ta-Nehisi Coates to his teenage son, Samori, about what it means to live in a Black body in the United States.

05

Twelve Years a Slave

Solomon Northup · Memoir

Twelve Years a Slave, published in 1853, is the memoir of Solomon Northup, a free Black man from New York who was kidnapped in 1841, sold into slavery in Louisiana, and held for twelve years before recovering his freedom.

06

A Gentleman in Moscow

Amor Towles · Historical fiction

In 1922, Count Alexander Rostov is sentenced by a Bolshevik tribunal — not to death, but to permanent house arrest in Moscow's Metropol Hotel.