It is fair to suggest that as a novelist, Picoult has spent much of her career exploring those moments in which everything changes – the enduring echoes of single decisions, the more fateful hinges that support our lives.
As if her stellar reputation and consistently bestselling output aren’t compelling enough reasons to grab her new novel, check out the competition we are running until November:
With her newest novel, The Book of Two Ways, Picoult really homes in on the idea that every life can take multiple paths – and that those paths can be easily split, Sliding Doors style, by something that does, or something that does not, happen. Taking on life and death and opportunities taken and missed, this new adventure is Picoult at her judgment-free and graceful best.
Sometimes things become clearest when the worst happens. Dawn Edelstein is forced to take rapid stock of her life when she and her fellow passengers are told to brace for a crash landing. To her surprise, her thoughts immediately go to a man she used to know, Wyatt Armstrong, instead of her husband. Though she has not seen him in fifteen years, he is the last thing she sees in her mind.
But Dawn, amazingly, survives. Her husband, her daughter and the patients that rely on her wait back in Boston, and yet that single terrifying crisis has shifted something within her. As the survivors are treated, the airline offers to get them to wherever they want to go. She should go back to her family, but Dawn immediately thinks of Egypt – where archaeologist Wyatt will be, and where she might conclude her research on The Book of Two Ways, the first known map of the afterlife.
With this one decision, Dawn’s life splits in two and a pair of parallel futures unfolds at the same time, prompting her to deeply ponder the bigger questions of life: what does it mean to live well? What is the real nature of choice?… and what happens at the end?
Employing an intelligent blend of ethical dilemma, philosophy, personal drama and even a dash of Egyptology, The Book of Two Ways tugs at all the right heartstrings.
Also available in Afrikaans
And while we’re all excited about Jodi Picoult, why not extend that excitement to her previous book, if you haven’t already.
A Spark of Light
Picoult takes on the ubiquitous abortion debate, looking at an unerringly urgent topic through the lens of ordinary lives clashing together in a single crisis, in this brilliant, shocking and ineffably human new novel.
Thought-provoking and powerful, A Spark of Light is an expertly structured story that lingers long after it’s done.
The Center for Women’s Reproductive Health offers a last chance at hope – but nobody ends up there by choice.
Its very existence is controversial, and to the demonstrators who barricade the building every day, the service it offers is no different from legalised murder.
Now life and death decisions are being made horrifyingly real: a lone protester with a gun has taken the staff, patients and visitors hostage.
Starting at the tensest moment in the negotiations for their release, A Spark of Light unravels backwards, revealing hour by urgent hour what brought each of these people – the gunman, the negotiator, the doctors, nurses and women who have come to them for treatment – to this point.