Colson Whitehead was awarded this year’s Pultizer Prize in Fiction for his novel Nickel Boys. This is the second time Whitehead has won the award in four years — he won in 2017 for his novel The Underground Railroad.

The other books awarded Pulitzers this year were The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America by Greg Grandin and The Undying: Pain, Vulnerability, Mortality, Medicine, and Care by Anne Boyer, winners in non-fiction; Sontag: Her Life and Work by Benjamin Moser, winner in biography; Sweet Taste of Liberty: A True Story of Slavery and Restitution in America by W. Caleb McDaniel, the winner in history; and The Tradition by Jericho Brown, which won in poetry. The full list is here.

Read what we said about Nickel Boys and this year’s two finalists for the award, Ben Lerner’s The Topeka School and Ann Patchett’s The Dutch House, when they were published:

The Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead (Doubleday)

 A recent Time magazine cover heralded “America’s Storyteller: By Mining the Past, Novelist Colson Whitehead Takes Readers into an Uneasy Present.” Like Whitehead’s groundbreaking The Underground Railroad, which won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, The Nickel Boys is a rare book that simultaneously climbs the bestseller lists, receives literary acclaim, and, most elusively, shifts the national conversation. While The Underground Railroad was a fantastical imagination of the railroad as physical rather than metaphorical that revealed enslavement in its hellacious iterations, The Nickel Boys is rooted in the horrific abuse and corruption of the now-shuttered Dozier School for Boys in Florida. The last time an American fiction writer graced the cover of Time was 2010, when the magazine headlined Jonathan Franzen a “Great American Novelist.” Whitehead very much deserves that acclaim.

The Topeka School by Ben Lerner (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

A great big American novel doesn’t come along that often, but Lerner’s The Topeka School is one that is both an intimate portrait of a family and an exploration of topical and epic concerns. Lerner, winner of a MacArthur “genius” grant, is known for his “autofiction,” but here he stretches that form into a big social novel, situated in the middle of Kansas at the end of the Clinton administration but extending to the arrival of Trump’s MAGA. The story is told through interwoven narratives, shifting perspectives between high school debater and cool kid Adam and his psychologist parents, including his mother whose success has landed her as an expert on the Oprah show, as well as a troubled teen, an outsider who injects eerie unease early in the novel. Toxic masculinity, the homophobic Westboro Baptist Church, Bob Dole, Donald Trump, and finally MAGA add a topspin to this dynamic novel about language, power, and violence embedded into American culture.

The Dutch House by Ann Patchett (Harper)

Patchett has a magical way of inspiring readers to root for her self-focused characters, ones who would be avaricious and selfish in the gaze of another novelist, in her latest family saga, this one with a brother and sister at its heart. The brother narrates, in an almost wistful tone, the family experience through the lens of the vast windows of the ornate mansion in Elkins Park, Pennsylvania, that his real estate-savvy father bought for his family. The disappearance of the tycoon’s wife cements the relationship.