Bonbon had a tenuous relationship with his father, an unorthodox sociologist who performed numerous traumatizing social experiments on him as a child and held lofty expectations for Bonbon to become a respected community leader in Dickens. Sitting before the court, Bonbon starts to reflect on what led up to this moment and recounts his upbringing. The story begins with the narrator (referred to as either 'me' or 'Bonbon') standing trial before the Supreme Court for crimes related to his attempt to restore slavery and segregation in his hometown of Dickens, an 'agrarian ghetto' on the outskirts of Los Angeles, California.

The narrator and most of the characters are African-Americans in an urban farming area in the fictional town of Dickens, California. Although The Sellout was not written in response to any specific event, the novel was released during a time of racial reckoning surrounding multiple instances of police brutality and the Ferguson, Missouri protests. Beatty has stated his motivation for writing the novel was that ' was broke'. Beatty’s other notable works include The White Boy Shuffle, Tuff, and Slumberland. Published in 2015, The Sellout was the latest in Paul Beatty’s body of work that explores racial identity in the United States and the pervasive historical effects of racism. In October 2016, it won the Booker Prize, making Beatty the first US writer to win that award. The novel takes place in and around Los Angeles, California, and muses about the state of racial relations in the U.S. The Sellout is a 2015 novel by Paul Beatty published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, and in the UK by Oneworld Publications in 2016.

The Sellout by Paul Beatty