The new international prizewinning non-fiction from John Edgar Wideman, one of the standout black American writers of the modern age and winner of the 2017 Prix Femina Étranger. The murder of Emmett Till is a familiar story, it has become American legend. But one twist in the Till story is rarely mentioned: just ten years earlier, Louis Till, Emmett's father, was executed by the army. In 1955, when both boys were fourteen years old, Wideman saw the horrific photograph of dead Emmett's battered face. Decades later, upon discovering that Louis had been court-martialled and hanged, he was impelled to investigate the intertwined fates of father and son. In Writing to Save a Life , Wideman brings extraordinary insight and intimacy to this devastating story. Part exploration and part meditation, it is a conversation between generations, the living and the dead.