DAY 5 MONDAY 23 JULY 2001 5.53AM The sun is shining through the bars of my window on what must be a glorious summer day. I've been incarcerated in a cell five paces by three for twelve and a half hours, and will not be let out again until midday; eighteen and a half hours of solitary confinement. There is a child of seventeen in the cell below me who has been charged with shoplifting – his first offence, not even convicted – and he is being locked up for eighteen and a half hours, unable to speak to anyone. This is Great Britain in the twenty-first century, not Turkey, not Nigeria, not Kosovo, but Britain. On Thursday 19 July 2001, after a perjury trial lasting seven weeks, Jeffrey Archer was sentenced to four years in jail. He was to spend the first twenty-two days and fourteen hours in HMP Belmarsh, a double A-Category high-security prison in South London, which houses some of Britain ‘s most violent criminals. This is the author's daily record of the time he spent there.

On August 9, 2001, 22 days after Archer—now known as Prisoner FF8282—was sentenced to four years in prison for perjury, he was transferred from a maximum security prison in London to HMP Wayland, a medium security prison in Norfolk. For the next 67 days, as he waited to be reclassified for an "open," minimum security prison, he encountered not only the daily degradations of a dangerously overstretched prison system but also the spirit and courage of his fellow inmates. Purgatory: A Prison Diary, Volume 2, is Archer's frank, shocking, sometimes humorous, sometimes horrifying account of those 67 days.

Heaven, Jeffrey Archer's final volume in his trilogy of prison diaries, covers the period of his transfer from a medium security prison, HMP Wayland, to his eventual release on parole in July 2003. It includes a shocking account of the traumatic time he spent in the notorious Lincoln jail and the events that led to his incarceration there, and also shines a harsh light on a system that is close to its breaking point. Told with humor, compassion, and honesty, the diary closes with a thought-provoking manifesto that will be applauded by reform advocates and the prison population alike.