Novelist Jodi Picoult is the author of 10 No. 1 New York Times best-sellers, includingSmall Great ThingsandLeaving Time. Her new novel,A Spark of Light, is set at a Jackson, Mississippi, abortion clinic targeted by a vigilante gunman.
An estranged brother and sister meet for the first time in years. Instead of allowing them to reconcile, Baxter reels backward to show what broke apart their relationship. I was so blown away by this technique, I swore that one day I, too, would write a book in reverse. And that turned out to be A Spark of Light.
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Dinesen is the pen name of Karen Blixen, who left Denmark for a coffee farm in Kenya. What has always interested me about this memoir is how Dineson/Blixen reveals the least about the things that meant the most, such as her relationship with Denys Finch-Hatton. I love the idea that writers sometimes realize that words cannot cover the things they need to say.
A foster child in Nazi Germany is placed with a family who later hide a Jew in their basement. This is a story about the power of words to hurt and to heal. But what really makes it special is Zusak's prose, and the sheer audacity of having Death as a narrator.
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This is the book I wish I'd written. A boy found floating in a lifeboat in the Pacific tells his rescuers a story involving a hyena, a zebra, an orangutan, and a tiger that were in the boat with him. When no one believes him, he says that he was on the lifeboat with three other people, one a bloodthirsty chef who killed the others. His rescuers (and the reader) must decide which version they believe. How can a writer not love a novel that asks to whom a story belongs?
A book I'm still thinking about a year after reading it. When Abraham Lincoln's son Willie dies, other spirits in the graveyard all have something to say. What results is a collage of narrative that somehow yields a story about grief and loss but also inspiration.
Ward is, simply put, a legend in the making. This story haunts me, illustrating how the fierceness of family can be both tender and as destructive as the storm — Hurricane Katrina — that provides the novel's backdrop.
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