Oprah picks prison memoir for book club

Anthony Ray Hinton, wrongly imprisoned for nearly 30 years, can hardly believe how his luck has changed.

Hinton’s memoir, “The Sun Does Shine: How I Found Life and Freedom on Death Row,” is Oprah Winfrey’s latest book club pick, a dream for virtually any writer and beyond the imagination for a man who was once confined to a five-by-sevenfoot cell. Tuesday‘s announcement comes three years after Hinton’s release from Jefferson County Jail in Birmingham, Alabama. He had been convicted for two 1985 murders in Birmingham, where he still lives.

Hinton, during a recent telephone interview, called Winfrey’s endorsement “the second biggest surprise” of his life. “The biggest surprise was being charged with a crime I didn’t commit.”

Published in March, Hinton’s book tells of his conviction for killing two fast-food restaurant workers during separate robberies, and his decades spent on death row. His efforts to overturn the conviction reached the U.S. Supreme Court, which in 2014 unanimously ruled he had been denied a fair trial. Hinton was freed after new ballistics tests contradicted the only evidence — an analysis of crime-scene bullets — that connected Hinton to the slayings. When he finally got out, the words he spoke to loved ones greeting him — “The sun does shine” — became his memoir’s title.

Hinton, 61, likened himself to Job as a man who lost everything, but eventually saw his life restored.