Jodi Picoult

Jodi Picoult is an American author who has built her career around the kind of morally fraught, issue-driven novel that book clubs are built for, alternating first-person narrators to circle a single wrenching dilemma from opposing, equally sympathetic angles. Since her 1992 debut, Songs of the Humpback Whale, she has published roughly thirty novels centered on courtroom drama, medical crisis, and family rupture — a daughter conceived to be a genetic donor for her dying sister in My Sister's Keeper, a school shooting's aftermath in Nineteen Minutes, a Black nurse charged after a white supremacist couple's infant dies in her care in Small Great Things — each built on months of obsessive research interviewing surgeons, lawyers, survivors, and activists. Almost all of Picoult's novels stand entirely alone, without a continuing series or cast, though she has occasionally collaborated: a young-adult fairy-tale duology, Between the Lines and Off the Page, co-written with her daughter Samantha van Leer, and Mad Honey, co-written with novelist Jennifer Finney Boylan. My Sister's Keeper was adapted into a major 2009 film starring Cameron Diaz, and several other novels have been adapted for television. Picoult has become one of the defining voices of American book-club fiction over more than three decades, known for tackling hot-button social and ethical issues through the lens of ordinary New England families in crisis.