In conversation with Jo Piazza

A “quite prescient and worthwhile” writer who “understands her characters inside and out” (The New York Times Book Review), Jodi Picoult has authored many No. 1 bestsellers that are renowned for combining controversial topics with nuanced characters and precise descriptions of suburbia’s fraught reality. Her 28 novels include House Rules, Handle with Care, Wish You Were Here, Nineteen Minutes, My Sister's Keeper, and Small Great Things, as well as the young adult novel Between the Lines, co-written with her daughter, Samantha van Leer.

The author of more than a dozen books, Jennifer Finney Boylan achieved great literary success in 2003 with her critically acclaimed memoir She’s Not There, the first bestselling book by a transgender American. Her other works include You Are You, Long Black Veil, and I’m Looking Through You, a memoir about her upbringing in a dilapidated mansion on Philadelphia’s Main Line. Currently the inaugural Anna Quindlen Writer-in-Residence at Barnard College of Columbia University, a fellow at Harvard University’s Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, and a trustee of PEN America, Boylan is a former longtime national co-chair of GLAAD.

In their first collaborative novel, Picoult and Boylan tell the story of a woman who flees with her son to her sleepy New Hampshire hometown only to face the possibility that the teenager shares his father’s explosive tendencies.