“Orange Is the New Black: My Year in a Women’s Prison” By Piper Kerman (Spiegel & Grau, $25) Ten thousand dollars, one West African drug lord, and a decade after her role in an international heroin trafficking ring, memoirist Piper Kerman finds herself sentenced to more than a year in a federal prison.

As a 23-year-old Smith College graduate, self-admittedly a “well-educated young lady from Boston with a thirst for bohemian counterculture and no clear plan,” Kerman had served as a carrier, bringing tainted cash from Chicago to Paris to Brussels for a fleeting love interest.

She did not know that years later, in her early 30s with a longterm boyfriend and a New York City job and apartment, the mistakes of her youth would finally catch up to her.

In her account, “Orange is the New Black: My Year in a Women’s Prison,” Kerman reveals the choices, characters and experiences encountered along a circuitous route from childish college grad to selfaware, independent adult.

After four years of routine and rigorous academics, Kerman longed for the extraordinary, for something different and dangerous. She befriended Nora, a mysterious older woman used to “throwing money around in a way that got attention.”

After striking up a relationship with Nora, Kerman grows enthralled, and perhaps jealous of her exciting jaunts abroad: “dark, awful, scary, wild and exciting beyond belief” trips. Eventually, she agrees to carry drug money for Nora across continents.

Fast-forward: Kerman is arrested and sentenced to 13 months in a federal prison in Connecticut for her involvement in the drug ring. Kerman’s account of her time in jail — the inane bureaucratic rules; the fellow female prisoners with whom she has, to her great surprise, much in common; the routine and the loneliness of seemingly endless days — is occasionally patronizing, surprisingly comic and often affecting.

(c) 2010 King Features Synd., Inc.