Piper Kerman

If you met Piper Kerman in the early years of this decade, you'd have met a spirited young woman in her early 30s, an attractive, blonde, blue-eyed, Smith graduate thriving in her career as a creative director, leading an exuberant life with an interesting collection of downtown friends, engaged to a magazine editor - in short, a young urbanite who had her life completely together.

But if you met Piper Kerman in 2004, you'd have met her in an orange jumpsuit, serving a fifteen-month sentence at "Club Fed", in the infamous women's Federal correctional facility in Danbury - a sharp left turn in her life that came about when the mistakes of an adventurous youth caught up with her, in the form of a Federal indictment on a ten year-old narcotics charge.

ORANGE IS THE NEW BLACK: My Year at "Club Fed" is not a story of the wrongly imprisoned - Piper did the crime, and did the time. But she does have a unique perspective on the experience of women in the Federal prison system, and has given us a compelling, richly detailed, often hilarious and unfailingly compassionate portrait of life on the inside.

Make no mistake - this is not your ordinary prison memoir. Readers will be drawn to the story of an unexpected community of women, filled with characters as eccentric and vividly-drawn as the denizens of John Berendt's Savannah; to the humor and unexpected humanity that can be found in the most unlikely settings, as in Josh Killmer-Purcell's I AM NOT MYSELF TODAY; and to a sympathetic and endlessly surprising look at a world we'll never hear about from Martha Stewart (though Martha would confirm the inventiveness of illegal prison cookery - see microwave cheesecake recipe, p 63) - a world in which most readers could never imagine themselves, without a narrator like Piper Kerman.