Helen Prejean · 1993 · exile

Sister Helen Prejean's account of becoming spiritual adviser to two condemned men at Angola and watching both die in the electric chair. She began by answering a request to write to a stranger, and ended by changing how America argues about the death penalty - while refusing, throughout, to make the crimes smaller than they were.

1. 1
   St Thomas

   At forty, Sister Helen Prejean moves out of a comfortable religious life into a New Orleans housing project and teaches at Hope House - and is asked, more or less in passing, whether she would write to a man on death row.

2. 2
   Angola

   The Louisiana State Penitentiary: eighteen thousand acres of former plantation on a bend of the Mississippi, the largest maximum-security prison in the United States - and Patrick Sonnier, who has been waiting six years.

3. 3
   New Iberia

   Iberia Parish, where in November 1977 two teenagers went to a homecoming game and parked afterwards - and where Lloyd LeBlanc, whose son was killed, later tells her he chose to forgive, which she finds hard to hear.

4. 4
   Baton Rouge

   The Pardon Board and the Governor's office, where the appeals run out one at a time - and where Prejean learns how much of a capital case is decided by the quality of a lawyer nobody paid for.

5. 5
   Angola

   5 April 1984, and she walks the last corridor with Sonnier - the guard's call of dead man walking that gives the book its title, and a promise she keeps to be a face he can look at.

6. 6
   Mandeville

   Across the lake, and the second case: Robert Lee Willie, who murdered Faith Hathaway near here in 1980 - and Vernon Harvey, the girl's stepfather, who wants the execution and is not made whole by it.

7. 7
   St Thomas

   Back to the project, two executions witnessed and a national argument beginning - and the book that came out of it, which changed the terms of the American death-penalty debate more than any court ruling of the decade.