The Nickel Boys does several things at once. It's a story about a real kind of American institution, a friendship under pressure, and a structural surprise that makes you reread the whole book in your head. So "what to read next" depends on which part got you. We've grouped these by what they share with it, and every pick says why it's here.
The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead (2016)
The obvious first stop, and the right one. Whitehead's previous novel follows Cora, who escapes a Georgia plantation and travels north on an underground railroad that is, in this book, a real train in real tunnels. Each state she passes through is a different version of America's cruelty. It won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. It's bigger, stranger and more openly inventive than The Nickel Boys, so expect a different texture from the same steady, unsentimental voice.
Read it next if you came away wanting more of Whitehead's control and less restraint on the imagination.
Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward (2017)
Ward's National Book Award winner follows a thirteen-year-old boy, Jojo, his little sister and their troubled mother on a road trip across Mississippi to collect his father from the state penitentiary at Parchman. Along the way a ghost of a boy who died at Parchman decades earlier attaches himself to the family. If the unmarked graves at the start of The Nickel Boys stayed with you, this is the novel that gives one of those lost boys a voice.
Read it next if you want the same history told with more lyricism and a touch of the supernatural.
Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan (2021)
Different country, same question: what does an ordinary person do when they find out what an institution is doing to children behind its walls? Keegan's novella is set around one of Ireland's Magdalene laundries in 1985, and like Whitehead she gets maximum force from minimum words. It's a little over a hundred pages. Read our review of Small Things Like These.
Read it next if what moved you most was the moral weight carried in a very short book.
Harlem Shuffle by Colson Whitehead (2021)
Whitehead's follow-up to The Nickel Boys is a crime novel set in Harlem from the late 1950s into the early 1960s, the same years Elwood is at Nickel. Ray Carney sells furniture, mostly honestly, and fences the occasional stolen goods for his cousin, mostly reluctantly. It's funnier and lighter than The Nickel Boys, with heist plots and a great sense of the city, but it's still about how hard America makes it for a Black man to stay respectable. Its sequel, Crook Manifesto, continues Carney's story into the 1970s.
Read it next if you need something with the same author's eye and a lot less heartbreak.
Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi (2016)
Two half-sisters are born in eighteenth-century Ghana. One marries the British governor of Cape Coast Castle and lives in its upper rooms; the other is imprisoned in its dungeons and shipped to America. Each chapter jumps a generation and follows a descendant, down two lines across three hundred years, ending in the present. It's the long view of the history The Nickel Boys catches in one decade.
Read it next if the past-and-present structure of The Nickel Boys was what hooked you.
The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett (2020)
Twin sisters run away from a small Louisiana town in the 1950s; one lives as Black, one passes as white, and their daughters eventually collide. It's about identity, secrets and the long shadow of a single choice, and it moves fast. Read our review of The Vanishing Half.
Read it next if the identity twist at the heart of The Nickel Boys is the thing you keep thinking about.
The Water Dancer by Ta-Nehisi Coates (2019)
Coates's first novel follows Hiram Walker, born enslaved on a declining Virginia plantation, who has a photographic memory and a mysterious power linked to water and to his lost mother. It becomes a story about the Underground Railroad, with spies and safe houses. It's slower and more ornate than Whitehead's books, and very moving in its portrait of families separated by sale.
Read it next if you liked how Whitehead brushes history against something almost uncanny.
Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver (2022)
A modern David Copperfield, set in the Appalachian mountains of southwest Virginia during the opioid crisis. Demon is a foster kid failed by nearly every system meant to protect him, and he tells his own story with outrageous wit. It's long, around 550 pages, but the narrator carries you. Read our review of Demon Copperhead.
Read it next if what stayed with you was a child at the mercy of adults who are paid to look after him.
How to pick
If you want the closest match in tone, read Sing, Unburied, Sing. If you want more of Whitehead, start with The Underground Railroad and save Harlem Shuffle for when you need cheering up. If you want something you can finish tonight, it's Small Things Like These. And if your book club already did The Nickel Boys and wants a second novel to compare it to, The Vanishing Half gives you the most to argue about.