The Enchanted

The Enchanted is a novel by the American writer Rene Denfeld, published in 2014. It was her first book, it takes place inside a prison, and it was awarded the Prix du Premier Roman Etranger in 2014 and a medal for fiction from the American Library Association the following year.

The narrator is a prisoner who is never named. He is on death row, in darkness for most of the day, and he has learned to occupy his imagination instead of his cell, which is how he describes the prison, the men in it and the creatures he invents. His account is not a reliable record of the building so much as a rendering of what a person does with a place designed to strip him of everything else.

Alongside him the novel follows a woman who works as an investigator for the defence in capital cases, going back through the pasts of prisoners to find what might save them. She is looking into the background of a condemned man when she finds material that complicates the ordinary categories of victim and offender, and material that concerns her own life as well.