The Green Mile. Those who walk it do not return -- because at the end of that walk, at the Cold Mountain penitentiary, is the room in which sits the electric chair.

It is 1932. The newest inhabitant of Death Row is a giant black man, John Coffey, convicted -- apparently on his own admission -- of the senseless and brutal murder of two little girls.

Executing a man is never easy, but at first sight taking society's revenge on Coffey is one of the easier jobs chief guard Paul Edgecombe and his fellow warders have had to do.

But nothing is as it seems with John Coffey, and around him unfolds a story both bizarre and horrifying.

Whether he is an evil murderer or a holy innocent, Coffey has strange powers, which may yet offer salvation to others, even if they can do nothing to save him.

THE GREEN MILE is perhaps the finest novel yet by one of the world's greatest storytellers, by turns warmly human and shatteringly horrific, and unputdownable from first page to last.