Reader’s Digest UK – August 2019

AUGUST 2019 • 123

READER’S DIGEST

brutal white supremacy
still firmly in place.
Elwood Curtis is a
scholarly black teenager
with a strong faith in the
ideals of Martin Luther
King. But then he
inadvertently hitches a lift in a stolen
car—for which he’s arrested, found
guilty of theft and “sentenced to hell”,
as he understandably describes it in
later life. At Nickel Reform School,
where he’s sent, the staff ’s unremitting
violence and cruelty are all the more
terrifying for being so random.
(Horrifyingly, Nickel is closely based
on a real Florida institution of the
time.) But, as Whitehead makes clear,
Nickel wasn’t an aberration—which is
why his entirely righteous anger is
aimed not just at the school itself, but at
the whole society that produced and
condoned it. The result is nobody’s
idea of a comfort read—but if there’s a
more powerful novel this year, I’d be
very surprised.

Can you guess the writer from these
clues (the fewer you need the better)?

1. He’s the only American writer who
   won the Nobel Prize in Literature during
   the 1950s.


2. The places he lived included Paris, Cuba
   and Key West, Florida.


3. His novels included The Sun Also Rises
   and The Old Man and the Sea.

Paperbacks

Step by Step

by Simon Reeve (Hodder, £9.99)

The TV travel presenter’s gripping

account of his journeys in 120 countries.

A View to a Kilt

by Wendy Holden

(Head of Zeus, £8.99)

Holden’s glossy-magazine journalist

Laura Lake heads to the Highlands for

another witty and entertaining romp

around the posher side of British life.

From the Corner of the Oval Office

by Beck Dorey-Stein

(Black Swan, £8.99)

To her own surprise, the author gets a

stenographer job at the White House,

where she has close access to President

Obama, and unwisely falls for a

colleague. Full of insider gossip and

comic misadventures.

Breathe

by Dominick Donald

(Hodder, £8.99)

Acclaimed crime debut set in the

infamous London fog of 1952—where,

naturally, a killer lurks...

First You Write a Sentence

by Joe Moran (Penguin, £9.99)

Terrific analysis of what makes for good

writing. Indispensable for would-be

writers, absorbing for everybody else.

Answer on p126

Name the author