To mark the end of 2019 we're re-sharing some of our favorite conversations from our year in reading. Among the standouts: our chat with Colson Whitehead, the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award-winning author of The Underground Railroad , who returned to the B&N Podcast for a conversation about his novel The Nickel Boys. It's a riveting story of injustice, friendship, resistance and survival that turns on the experience of two boys incarcerated in a Florida institution, and its reverberating effects on their lives. Whitehead joined B&N's Miwa Messer for a talk about the true story that was the inspiration for the novel -- a 2019 Barnes & Noble Book Club selection  -- the battle between optimism and pessimism in his own worldview, and how he learns from the characters he brings to life.