Jodi Picoult, LONE WOLF: Book Tour Started This Morning

Jodi Picoult arrives to launch LONE WOLF

What happens to the family of a person who loves his work so much that he can't be there for his wife and children? Could someone bond so strongly with a pack of wolves -- for which everything comes down to family -- that he loses his own?

And when that person, Luke Warren, is incapacitated with a traumatic brain injury, with no likely recovery, how can the people responsible for his life support regain enough of their own souls' ease, to make the right decision?

That's where Jodi Picoult's new novel LONE WOLF begins. As she pries open the Warren family, she also brings the reader through Luke's eyes into the lives of wolves, which she herself researched while preparing to write this.

At this morning's launch for the book, sponsored by the Norwich (VT) Bookstore and held a few miles from Picoult's New Hampshire home, Picoult told of wolf pack structure and personalities; habits of wolves, including how they feed, communicate, and nurture; and drawing three women from the audience, taught them to give three different kinds of wolf calls, creating the sound of a hunting pack.

It was, as always, a fabulous launch to the annual Picoult tour. This year, there will actually be TWO books coming out for this author -- the second is co-written with her daughter Samantha Van Leer and is a "young adult" novel called Between the Lines  (releasing in June). Picoult noted that she often writes as if she were watching a movie and describing it -- and because she and her daughter found themselves writing in the same way, the book grew as if the two shared a single dream.

And for a look even further in the future, Picoult commented briefly on her 2013 title, The Storyteller, which wrestles with the unexpected encounter of a dying Nazi SS guard and the granddaughter of a Holocaust survivor.

Picoult's tour continues this evening and tomorrow in Massachusetts, goes down the East Coast, then flies to the West, then point in between. Her schedule is at her website. Don't miss the chance to meet and listen to this author, whose novels so often probe the vulnerable cross sections of medicine, law, and love.

PS - We brought back to Kingdom Books two lovely signed copies of LONE WOLF today.