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A Lesson Before Dying
Ernest J. Gaines, 1993
Knopf Doubleday
272 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780375702709


Summary

Winner, 1993 National Book Critics Circle Award

Set in a small Cajun community in the late 1940s, A Lesson Before Dying is an "enormously moving" (Los Angeles Times) novel of one man condemned to die for a crime he did not commit and a young man who visits him in his cell.

In the end, the two men forge a bond as they both come to understand the simple heroism of resisting—and defying—the expected. (From the publisher.)