River of Fire: My Spiritual Journey
HELEN PREJEAN
(HODDER & STOUGHTON, 320 PP, £16.99)
Tablet bookshop price £15.30 • tel 020 7799 4064

During my thirteen years as editor, the most outstanding person to give the Tablet Lecture was Helen Prejean. Many people in the audience had read her passionate, campaigning book on capital punishment, Dead Man Walking, and seen the movie based on it.

Helen Prejean’s campaign to combat capital punishment began when she started writing to people on death row in her home state of Louisiana. Then came books, the movie, an opera, and her successful lobbying of popes to change Catholic teaching on capital punishment. Pope Francis announced last year that the death penalty is unacceptable in all cases “because it is an attack on the inviolability and dignity of the person”.