Hollow Bones
A Novel
-
- $14.99
Publisher Description
From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of By Any Other Name comes a riveting novel about the risks we take to protect the ones we love in a world where crisis is always just around the corner.
On September 11, 2001, when Molly Fitzgerald was only two months old, her mother went to an appointment at the World Trade Center and never came home. Her father and the stepmother who raised her couldn’t have loved her more, but she still grew up with a healthy dread of disasters.
Now an adult, she runs the Rhode Island Department for Emergency Preparedness, mapping out ways to save lives during storms, epidemics, and airplane crashes. She and her husband, Jesse—a police polygraph expert with his own history of crisis—have found a love that is a solace in a dangerous world. But then the unexpected upends their new marriage, leading them both to question everything they thought they knew.
Moving between past and present, Hollow Bones is an epic story of the lies we tell ourselves as we write the narratives of our lives, the plans we design to protect ourselves at the worst moments, and the ties that bind mothers and daughters.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
Jodi Picoult turns a woman’s lifelong fear of catastrophe into an intensely emotional story about love, parenthood, and the limits of being prepared. Molly was just two months old when her mother died in the terrorist attacks on 9/11, a loss that’s shaped the way she sees danger ever since. Now in charge of Rhode Island’s emergency response program, she has built her life around anticipating the worst. Then Molly meets Jesse, who understands that instinct better than most, and the two fall deeply in love—with gloriously written abandon. But neither love nor Molly’s hypervigilance can insulate them from what comes next. It would be a shame to spoil any of the dramatic turns in this captivating read, but Picoult confronts subjects including postpartum psychosis and child abuse with unusual compassion and emotional precision, and her afterword about the real-life experiences that inspired the novel proves nearly as moving as the story itself.
