Jodi Picoult (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jodi_Picoult and http://www.jodipicoult.com/) has legions of devoted readers, currently having some 14 million copies of her books in print worldwide. She received an A.B. in creative writing from Princeton University and a master’s degree in education from Harvard. She is the author of seventeen novels including My Sister’s Keeper (now a major film starring Cameron Diaz and Abigail Breslin, 2009, http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1078588/?ref_=nv_sr_1), Nineteen Minutes, Change of Heart and Handle with Care . Why not give her latest, The Storyteller, a shot? The summary goes as follows.
Sage Singer befriends an old man who’s particularly beloved in her community. Josef Weber is everyone’s favourite retired teacher and Little League coach. They strike up a friendship at the bakery where Sage works. One day he asks Sage for a favour: to kill him. Shocked, Sage refuses…and then he confesses his darkest secret – he deserves to die, because he was a Nazi SS guard. Complicating the matter? Sage’s grandmother is a Holocaust survivor.
What do you do when evil lives next door? Can someone who’s committed a truly heinous act ever atone for it with subsequent good behaviour? Should you offer forgiveness to someone if you aren’t the party who was wronged? And most of all – if Sage even considers his request – is it murder, or justice? So – a little light reading for Christmas, then?
464 pages in Hodder paperback
ISBN 978-1444766677
Jodi Picoult