Lawrence Wright is one of the most celebrated nonfiction writers working today. His books about Scientology (Going Clear) and al-Qaida (The Looming Tower) were adapted for television and helped launch him to the closest thing magazine journalists have to celebrity. Lately, he’s turned his eye to his home state, with God Save Texas and Mr. Texas offering, respectively, nonfiction and fiction explorations of modern Texas politics. Wright’s latest, Redemption: Faith, Justice, and Sisterhood on Death Row, could serve as the third installment in that loose trilogy.
Expanding on a 2025 New Yorker article, the journalist tells the story of a group of contemplative nuns who, at first reluctantly, begin ministering to the women on Texas’ death row. The two groups are quickly drawn to each other, and apparent differences mask more fundamental similarities, like their shared isolation and similarly Spartan lives. Fear or anxiety about obvious differences between the two groups melt away almost immediately, with nuns sharing stories of past indiscretions and both bonding over their respective societal invisibility.
Wright employs vignettes—brief chapters about individual women on both sides of the bars—to draw the reader toward his subjects. The diaristic narrative also traces Wright’s own journeys to the prison and the nuns’ home, and he considers Texas’ outsize role in America’s execution industrial complex.
Redemption faces the same thorny questions that other books about death row navigate. It’s not necessarily a story about innocence, though some of the women’s cases make you wonder. The author wrestles with the almost universally traumatic backstories of the women, pondering how he may have turned out without his comfortable upbringing, and the reader is forced to consider the same. Not every death row tale is one of a wrongful conviction, and Wright works to include the perspectives of the families harmed by the violence that led to convictions. Thanks to his crackling style and reporting chops, Wright faces those challenges head-on.