Lives riven with impossible choices, invisibly scarred with regret and charged with hope, dread, love and trauma – these constitute the stuff and substance of so much of human life. Jodi Picoult fashions them into beautifully poignant prose.

An author who has produced fifteen novels in seventeen years, Picoult writes about exceptional subjects in a way that touches us all. Her capacity to evoke powerful identifications with the dilemmas and issues of her stories, if not the individual characters, show her as a novelist who can speak to everyman, from postal worker to high court judge, bus-driver to billionaire banker.

Picoult’s debut novel Songs of the Humpback Whale uses marine biology to render a profoundly human tale in which sudden loss brings new understanding and love. None of us are free from contingency, from the unexpected and unbidden. An oceanographer is forced to use his intuitive knowledge of tracking whales to re-find his abruptly departed wife and daughter, realising that he must, as with whales, try to imagine the world (and himself) through his wife’s eyes.

Her most recently published novel, Handle with Care, seems to deal with a rare infantile illness which will inevitably result in a future of broken bones and physical agony, but it also powerfully addresses us all with a fateful question: what would we do?  Would we risk poisoning our deepest friendship in order to secure legal compensation? Would we have terminated the pregnancy if we’d known? Picoult uses the extraordinary to confront us ordinary people with profound ethical issues we might otherwise ignore.