A Prisoner of Birth by Jeffrey Archer

Terrific. This the first Archer that I have read and I simply loved it. The book will keep you hooked till the end. The most interesting part of the novel is that you will find that the way the story progresses is predictable but somehow he brings in a twist here and there and makes it all the more engaging.
A Prisoner of Birth is the story of Danny Cartwright, an illiterate garage mechanic, who gets sentenced for twenty-two years and sent to Belmarsh prison, the highest security jail in the land, from where no inmate has ever escaped, for a crime that he has not committed, which is the murder of his best friend. If Danny Cartwright had proposed to Beth Wilson the day before, or the day after, he would not have been arrested and charged with the murder of his best friend. And when the four prosecution witnesses are a barrister, a popular actor, an aristocrat and the youngest partner in an established firm's history, who is going to believe his side of the story? But Spencer Craig, Lawrence Davenport, Gerald Payne and Toby Mortimer all underestimate Danny's determination to seek revenge and Beth's relentless quest to win justice, which forces all four protagonists to fight for their lives.
His experiences at the prison, his friendship with the inmates and especially his co mates with whom he shares the cell, Nicholas and Big Al, where he learns to read and write with the help of Nicholas and also improves his mannerisms are really interesting. Then his escape from Belmarsh and the courtroom scene makes the novel very entertaining.
This story is inspired from Alexandre Dumas's The Count of Monte Cristo.
It seems that this novel is Jeffrey Archer's most powerful novel since Kane & Abel so I guess I have to grab a copy of that too.