A Lesson Before Dying was an Oprah's Book Club selection when it was first published, in 1993. It went on to be nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. It is now reissued as a Serpent's Tail Classic with a foreword by the author Attica Locke. Set in a small Cajun community in the US south of the late 1940s, the story is narrated by a local schoolteacher, Grant Wiggins, who is persuaded to visit a young man named Jefferson in prison as he awaits execution by electric chair for a shoot-out in a liquor store in which three men were killed and he was the only survivor. He is convicted of a murder he didn't commit. Wiggins seems to be a reluctant hero; his anger and frustration glow white hot beneath every word. The pace is somewhat slow, and takes time to build, but the novel's spare prose and lack of embellishment make it quietly devastating.
