A Lesson Before Dying - Ernest Gaines

http://www.powells.com/biblio/63-9781852427238-0 - A black man (Jefferson) is wrongly sentenced to death in Lousiana in the 1940s for the murder of a white shopekeeper. The man's godmother asks her nephew, Grant - a teacher and the narrator of the novel -to meet with Jefferson - to make him a man before the state takes his life. Grant struggles with the concept - how to save a man's soul when he doesn't believe in an after-life, how to be an educated man in a world that degrades him. His meetings with Jefferson unfold slowly as Grant and Jefferson begin to communicate and attempt to understand the worlds in which the two of them live. I really enjoyed the writing in this book - it made me think of To Kill A Mockingbird, if that book had been written from the perspective of Tom Robinson's family. It is filled with the frustration and anger underlying racial politics in our criminal justice system, and literally brought tears to my eyes in the final pages. Well worth reading.