Where to start with Colson Whitehead

American novelist, born 1969. Won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2017 and 2020 and the National Book Award for Fiction in 2016.

Best Colson Whitehead book to start with: The Underground Railroad (2016), on 5 of the 14 lists it could have made.

If you read one Whitehead, make it The Underground Railroad. It won the National Book Award in 2016 and the Pulitzer Prize in 2017. It imagines the escape route for enslaved people as an actual underground railway, and follows a young woman through several states that each show a different version of America. It is gripping and often hard to read.

The Nickel Boys won the Pulitzer Prize in 2020 and is shorter and tighter. It is about two Black teenagers at a brutal reform school in Florida in the 1960s, and it is the better choice if you want a quicker book.

The Intuitionist is his first novel, set in an alternative America where elevator inspectors are divided into rival schools. John Henry Days was shortlisted for the Pulitzer in 2002; it follows a journalist at a festival for the folk hero John Henry, and it is the longest and most sprawling, so it suits a reader who has already enjoyed his shorter books.