“Picoult has become a master—almost a clairvoyant—at targeting hot issues and writing highly readable page-turners about them.”
—The Washington Post
With a fluid and wide-ranging style, bestselling novelist Jodi Picoult has been compared to writers as diverse as Alice Hoffman, John Grisham, and Daphne du Maurier. In some two dozen novels, she examines important social issues that are as thought-provoking as they are divisive. Her fiction nods to many genres, including literary fiction, legal thrillers, psychological portraits, romances, and ghost stories, giving her readers a fresh experience with each book. Picoult has an estimated 40 million books in print. Her last ten novels have debuted at #1 on The New York Times bestseller list, and five of her books have been made into movies.
Picoult’s first novel, Songs of the Humpback Whale, weaves five narrative voices into a story of love, loss, and self-discovery, which Publishers Weekly called a “powerful and affecting novel that demonstrates there are as many truths to a story as there are people to tell it.” Her critically acclaimed third book, Picture Perfect, is the story of an anthropologist trapped in a cycle of domestic abuse with her glamorous movie star husband. Library Journal praised the novel as “an important book from a talented writer we hope to hear from again and again.” In My Sister’s Keeper, Picoult tells the story of a thirteen-year-old, Anna, who was conceived by her parents specifically as a bone-marrow donor for her sister Kate, who has leukemia. The novel focuses on Anna’s search for identity in a life that was predetermined by her genetic ability to help her sister. Kirkus declared that Picoult “vividly evokes the physical and psychic toll a desperately sick child imposes on a family, even a close and loving one.”
“Picoult is a skilled wordsmith, and she beautifully creates situations that not only provoke the mind but touch the flawed souls in all of us.”
—The Boston Globe
Small Great Things, “one of the hardest” books yet for her to write, explores racism in America through the lens of a tragic incident at a Connecticut hospital. “I really had to explore my own beliefs and my own biases and learn a lot about myself and privileges that I’ve had that I’d never noticed before,” she told People. The Washington Post praised the novel as “the most important novel Jodi Picoult has ever written.”
Another instant New York Times #1 bestseller, Picoult’s newest novel, A Spark of Light, is a powerful and provocative novel about reproductive rights set during a hostage situation at a women’s health clinic. The Star-Tribune called it “a courageous and important work” and The Washington Post praised it as “Picoult at her fearless best… Timely, balanced, and certain to inspired debate.” A Spark of Light will be adapted into a limited television series by Sony Pictures TV starring Joey King.
Up next is The Book of Two Ways, a novel about life, death, love, and the choices that shape the course of a life. Taking its name from the ancient Egyptian map of the afterlife the book follows a woman whose contented existence is shaken following a near-death experience. The Book of Two Ways is out in September 2020.
She, her husband Tim, and their three children live in Hanover, New Hampshire with a Springer spaniel, two rescue puppies, two donkeys, ten chickens, and the occasional Holstein.
For more information about Jodi Picoult, please visit her on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and at jodipicoult.com.
