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Simon Austen is serving a life sentence for murder. Intelligent but illiterate, charming but also damaged, brutal and manipulative, he admits to what he's done but his motives are far from clear, even to himself. Then Simon learns to read and write. From his high security prison he begins an illicit correspondence with a series of women. The more he learns - about them and about himself - the higher the stakes become. Simon finds himself on a perilous, unpredictable and sometimes hilarious journey as he stumbles towards self-knowledge and redemption.
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A phenomenal first third of the book, but the quality eventually wanes around the midpoint of the book, as the author moves away from focusing on the improvement of a murderer into an investigation of alternative treatments for criminals. Towards the end of the third part of the book, there's a return to a more character-rehabilitation-driven focus, but by that point I had largely lost interest in the book.