My Time Will Come cover art

My Time Will Come

A Memoir of Crime, Punishment, Hope, and Redemption

Preview
Get this deal Try Premium Plus free
Offer ends 29 January 2026 at 11:59PM GMT.
Prime members: New to Audible? Get 2 free audiobooks during trial.
Just £0.99/mo for your first 3 months of Audible.
1 bestseller or new release per month—yours to keep.
Listen all you want to thousands of included audiobooks, podcasts, and Originals.
Auto-renews at £8.99/mo after 3 months. Cancel monthly.
Pick 1 audiobook a month from our unmatched collection - including bestsellers and new releases.
Listen all you want to thousands of included audiobooks, Originals, celeb exclusives, and podcasts.
Access exclusive sales and deals.
£8.99/month after 30 days. Renews automatically.

My Time Will Come

By: Ian Manuel, Bryan Stevenson - introduction
Narrated by: Ian Manuel
Get this deal Try Premium Plus free

£8.99/mo after 3 months. Cancel monthly. Offer ends 29 January 2026 at 11:59PM GMT.

£8.99/month after 30 days. Renews automatically. See here for eligibility.

Buy Now for £12.99

Buy Now for £12.99

LIMITED TIME OFFER | £0.99/mo for the first 3 months

Premium Plus auto-renews at £8.99/mo after 3 months. Terms apply.

About this listen

“My story has been told many times and by highly regarded experts in their fields—judges, prosecutors, juvenile probation officers, sociologists, journalists. But I would like to try to tell it to you myself. I have reason to believe the experts may be wrong about me. You see, today, thirty years later, I am neither in prison nor dead.” —from My Time Will Come

The United States is the only country in the world that sentences thirteen- and fourteen-year-old offenders, mostly youth of color, to life in prison without parole, regardless of the scientifically proven singularities of the developing adolescent brain—a heinous wrinkle in the scandal of mass incarceration. In 1991, Ian Manuel, then fourteen, was sentenced to life without parole for a non-homicide crime. In a botched mugging attempt with some older boys, he shot Debbie Baigrie, a young white mother of two, in the face. But as Bryan Stevenson has insisted, none of us should be judged only by the worst thing we have ever done.

Capturing the fullness of his humanity, here is Manuel’s powerful testimony of growing up homeless in Central Park Village in Tampa, Florida—a neighborhood riddled with poverty, gang violence, and drug abuse—and of his efforts to rise above his circumstances, only to find himself, partly through his own actions, imprisoned for two-thirds of his life, eighteen years of which were spent in solitary confinement. Here is the at once wrenching and inspiring story of how he endured the savagery of the United States prison system and of how his victim, an extraordinary woman, forgave him and bravely advocated for his freedom, which was achieved by a crusade on the part of the Equal Justice Initiative to address the barbarism of our judicial system and to bring about “just mercy.”

Full of unexpected twists and turns as it describes a struggle to attain the glory of redemption, My Time Will Come is a paean to the capacity of the human will to transcend adversity through determination and art; in Ian Manuel’s case, through his dedication to writing poetry.


Cover design by Linda Huang, based on an original image by Glenn Paul for the Equal Justice Initiative
True Crime Crime Emotionally Gripping Exciting Memoir

Listeners also enjoyed...

No Human Contact cover art
Anatomy of Innocence cover art
Marked for Life cover art
I Cried to Dream Again cover art
Our Class cover art
The White House Boys cover art
A Place to Stand cover art
Crown Heights cover art
Becoming Ms. Burton cover art
Saving My Assassin cover art
Halfway Home cover art
What Set Me Free (The Story That Inspired the Major Motion Picture Brian Banks) cover art
The Change Agent cover art
The Toughest Prison of All cover art
The Slow March of Light cover art
Buried Memories cover art

Critic reviews

“His story is heartbreaking and hopeful and needs to be told.”
—Booklist

“This is a stunner.”
Publishers Weekly [starred review]

"Manuel’s account is both heart-wrenching and uplifting.... Manuel vividly captures the terror of an adolescent thrust into adult incarceration and the added trauma of solitary confinement. He portrays the prison bureaucracy as arbitrary in its amplification of punitive measures, including routine beatings and tear-gassings... A disturbing, vital, necessary eyewitness addition to debates about the mass incarceration epidemic in the U.S."
—Kirkus Reviews
All stars
Most relevant
An extraordinary story, told with dignity, passion, and incredible humanity. The poetry interludes are my favourite. This is a book I will listen to again and again. I hope Ian Manuel writes another book soon. Thank you.

A deeply powerful book

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.