The Execution of Noa P. Singleton
A Novel
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- ¥1,000
発行者による作品情報
An unforgettable and unpredictable debut novel of guilt, punishment, and the stories we tell ourselves to survive
Noa P. Singleton never spoke a word in her own defense throughout a brief trial that ended with a jury finding her guilty of first-degree murder. Ten years later, having accepted her fate, she sits on death row in a maximum-security penitentiary, just six months away from her execution date.
Meanwhile, Marlene Dixon, a high-powered Philadelphia attorney who is also the mother of the woman Noa was imprisoned for killing. She claims to have changed her mind about the death penalty and will do everything in her considerable power to convince the governor to commute Noa's sentence to life in prison, in return for the one thing Noa can trade: her story. Marlene desperately wants to understand the events that led to her daughter’s death—events that only Noa knows of and has never shared. Inextricably linked by murder but with very different goals, Noa and Marlene wrestle with the sentences life itself can impose while they confront the best and worst of what makes us human.
Now with Extra Libris material, including a reader’s guide and bonus content
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
At the start of attorney Silver's searing debut, Noa Singleton, a convicted murderer on Pennsylvania's death row scheduled to be executed in six months, receives an offer of help from the most unlikely of sources her pregnant victim's mother, Marlene Dixon. A high-powered Philadelphia lawyer, Marlene has changed her views on the death penalty and will champion a petition to commute Noa's sentence to life in prison if Noa reveals what drove her to kill her one-time University of Pennsylvania classmate. But is this a good-faith offer, or just an attempt by a grief-stricken and guilt-ridden mother to exact some final revenge? The appealing but morally anorexic Noa is left to wonder as she proffers tantalizing peeks of her past (or are they self-serving fictions?), from memories of her narcissistic, manipulative mother to the ex-con father she would have been better off never meeting. This devastating read stands less as a polemic against the death penalty than as a heartbreaking brief for the preciousness of life.
