Author Guide · Contemporary Fiction
Books Written by
In 1987, while she was still studying creative writing at Princeton, Jodi Picoult had two short stories published in Seventeen magazine. Her first novel, Songs of the Humpback Whale, written while she was pregnant with her first child, came out in 1992. More than thirty years later about 40 million copies of her books are in print, in 34 languages. Most of her novels put an ordinary family in front of a question with no easy answer, and many end in a courtroom: a 13-year-old suing her parents for the rights to her own body, the aftermath of a school shooting, a Black nurse on trial for the death of a white supremacist’s baby. In 2023 a single Florida school district removed twenty of her novels from its libraries at once. This guide covers her 14 key books, in order, and where to begin.
By Lisanne Swart · 14 key books · 1998–2024 · Updated October 2026
ClickTap a spine to jump to that book below.
Quick answer
Jodi Picoult’s best-known books are My Sister’s Keeper (2004), Nineteen Minutes (2007), The Storyteller (2013) and Small Great Things (2016). Start with My Sister’s Keeper. Below are her 14 key books in order, how her books connect, and the rest of her work grouped by kind.
Where to Start with Jodi Picoult
If you want her best-known novel
→ My Sister’s Keeper (2004) — a 13-year-old takes her parents to court.
If you want a courtroom novel about race
→ Small Great Things (2016) — a Black nurse on trial in Connecticut.
If you want the book US schools ban most
→ Nineteen Minutes (2007) — a school shooting in a small New Hampshire town.
If you want something away from the courtroom
→ The Book of Two Ways (2020) — a death doula, a plane crash and an excavation in Egypt.
14 Jodi Picoult Books, in Order
The Pact
Chris Harte and Emily Gold grow up next door to each other in Bainbridge, New Hampshire, and become a couple as teenagers. Then Emily is found shot dead at the carousel where Chris works, Chris is found injured beside her, and he is charged with murder; he says they had made a suicide pact. His lawyer, Jordan McAfee, returns in Nineteen Minutes. Lifetime filmed it in 2002.
Plain Truth
A dead newborn is found on an Amish dairy farm in Pennsylvania, and Katie Fisher, the farmer’s unmarried 18-year-old daughter, is charged with murder while denying she was ever pregnant. Ellie Hathaway, a defence lawyer and distant relative, has to live on the farm under the bail conditions. Lifetime filmed it in 2004 with Mariska Hargitay as Ellie.
My Sister’s Keeper
Anna Fitzgerald, 13, was conceived as a genetic match for her older sister Kate, who has leukaemia, and has been a donor all her life. When she is expected to give Kate a kidney, she hires a lawyer, Campbell Alexander, and sues her parents for medical emancipation. It won an Alex Award in 2005 and was among the books most often challenged in US libraries in 2009. Nick Cassavetes filmed it in 2009 with Cameron Diaz and Abigail Breslin, with a different ending that Picoult did not approve.
Nineteen Minutes
Peter Houghton, a bullied student, opens fire at Sterling High School in New Hampshire and kills ten people. The novel moves between the trial and the years before it, through his former best friend Josie Cormier, her mother Alex, a superior court judge, and the detective Patrick Ducharme. It was her first novel to debut at No. 1 on the New York Times list, and PEN America named it the most banned book in US schools for the 2023–24 school year.
Change of Heart
Shay Bourne, New Hampshire’s first death-row prisoner in 69 years, asks to donate his heart to Claire Nealon, the young sister of the girl he was convicted of killing. Father Michael Wright, sent as his spiritual adviser, notices that Shay’s words echo a gospel the early Church rejected, while inmates and guards report miracles. Ian Fletcher from Keeping Faith (1999) returns.
House Rules
Jacob Hunt, 18, has Asperger’s syndrome and an obsession with forensic science; he follows crime scenes on a police scanner in Townsend, Vermont. When a murder is committed in town, the traits of his autism, such as avoiding eye contact, look like guilt to the police, and he is charged with murder. The story is told by Jacob, his mother Emma, his younger brother Theo and others.
The Storyteller
Sage Singer, a baker in New Hampshire with a scarred face, befriends Josef Weber, a well-liked 90-year-old retired teacher, at a grief group. He asks her to help him die, then tells her he was an SS guard. Sage’s grandmother Minka is a Holocaust survivor, and about a third of the book is her account of the war, which Picoult based on interviews with survivors.
Leaving Time
Jenna Metcalf, 13, is still looking for her mother Alice, a researcher who studied grief in elephants and vanished more than a decade earlier after a fatal accident at a New England elephant sanctuary. She enlists Serenity Jones, a psychic who has lost faith in her gift, and Virgil Stanhope, the detective who worked the original case. Alice’s journals about elephant mourning run through the book.
Small Great Things
Ruth Jefferson, a Black labour and delivery nurse with more than twenty years’ experience at a Connecticut hospital, is taken off a newborn’s care because his parents are white supremacists. When the baby goes into cardiac distress while she is alone with him, she hesitates, and is charged with a crime. It alternates between Ruth, her white public defender Kennedy McQuarrie and the baby’s father, Turk. In an author’s note Picoult describes asking what right she had to write about an experience she had not lived, and says the book is aimed at white readers.
A Spark of Light
A gunman takes hostages at the Center, a women’s reproductive health clinic in Jackson, Mississippi. The police negotiator, Hugh McElroy, learns that his fifteen-year-old daughter Wren is inside. The novel is told backwards, hour by hour through the standoff, to show what brought each person to the clinic that day.
The Book of Two Ways
Dawn Edelstein, a death doula in Boston, survives a plane crash and finds she was thinking not of her husband but of Wyatt Armstrong, an archaeologist she knew when she trained as an Egyptologist. The novel follows two possible lives: home to her family, or back to the dig in Egypt and her unfinished research on the Book of Two Ways, the first known map of the afterlife.
Wish You Were Here
On 13 March 2020 Diana O’Toole, an associate specialist at Sotheby’s, flies alone to the Galápagos because her boyfriend Finn, a surgical resident, cannot leave the hospital. The islands shut down on arrival, and she is stranded. Picoult based the setup on a young Scottish man stranded there in 2020, whom she interviewed along with the families who took him in. Netflix bought the film rights.
Mad Honey
Olivia McAfee has left an abusive marriage in Boston and taken over her late father’s beekeeping business in Adams, New Hampshire. Her son Asher falls for Lily Campanello, who has just moved to town; then Lily is found dead and Asher is arrested. Picoult wrote Olivia’s chapters and Jennifer Finney Boylan, the author of the memoir She’s Not There, wrote Lily’s.
By Any Other Name
Two women four centuries apart: Emilia Bassano, a writer of Italian and hidden Jewish descent from a family of Elizabethan court musicians, and her present-day descendant Melina Green, a young playwright who writes a play arguing that Emilia wrote works credited to Shakespeare. The book reached No. 1 on the New York Times list; its authorship theory is widely rejected by Shakespeare historians.
In What Order to Read Jodi Picoult
Picoult’s novels are standalone, so you can start anywhere. A few characters cross between them: the lawyer Jordan McAfee from The Pact (1998) defends the shooter in Nineteen Minutes (2007), and Ian Fletcher from Keeping Faith (1999) returns in Change of Heart (2008). Reading them in that order lets you meet them first, but it is not necessary.
The two books she wrote with her daughter Samantha van Leer, Between the Lines (2012) and Off the Page (2015), are a pair and should be read in order. In publication order you can see her move from family dramas set in New England towards larger public subjects: capital punishment, autism and the law, the Holocaust, race, abortion and, since 2020, the pandemic and Shakespeare.
A reading path
1. My Sister’s Keeper (2004)
2. Nineteen Minutes (2007)
3. The Storyteller (2013)
4. Small Great Things (2016)
5. The Book of Two Ways (2020)
Everything Else Jodi Picoult Published
Beyond the 14 key books: 19 more, grouped by kind.
Open a group with the + to see every book in it.
Other novels
14
14 books · 1992–2026
- 1992Songs of the Humpback Whaleher first novel, subtitled “A Novel in Five Voices”
- 1993Harvesting the Hearta young mother goes looking for the mother who left her
- 1995Picture Perfect
- 1996Mercy
- 1999Keeping Faith
- 2001Salem Fallsfilmed for Lifetime in 2011
- 2002Perfect Match
- 2003Second Glance
- 2005Vanishing Acts
- 2006The Tenth Circlefilmed for Lifetime in 2008
- 2009Handle with Care
- 2011Sing You Home
- 2012Lone Wolf
- 2026Hollow Bonespublished 15 September 2026
With Samantha van Leer (young adult)
2
2 books · 2012–2015
- 2012Between the Linesa girl and the prince in a fairy-tale book
- 2015Off the Pagesequel to Between the Lines
Other work
3
3 books · 2007–2011
- 2007Wonder Woman: Love and Murderher run on the DC comic, issues 6–10
- 2011Leaving Homeshort pieces
- 2011Over the Moona musical play for school casts, with her son Jake van Leer
The years · 1966–2026
Quick facts about Jodi Picoult
- Known for
- Contemporary novels that put an ordinary family in front of a hard moral or legal question, often ending in a courtroom, with around 40 million copies of her books in print.
- 1966
- Born in Nesconset, Long Island
- 1992
- Songs of the Humpback Whale, her first novel
- 2007
- Nineteen Minutes, her first No. 1 debut
- 2023
- Twenty of her books removed in Martin County, Florida
- 2026
- Hollow Bones
- Born
- 19 May 1966, Nesconset, Long Island, New York
- Education
- Princeton University, A.B. in English (1987); Harvard University, master’s in education (1990)
- Married
- Timothy Warren van Leer, in 1989; they have three children
- Lives
- Hanover, New Hampshire
- Sales
- About 40 million copies in print, in 34 languages
- Honours
- New England Bookseller Award for Fiction (2003); honorary doctorate, Dartmouth College (2010)
The red mark is 2004: My Sister’s Keeper, the novel about a 13-year-old who sues her parents for the rights to her own body.
How Jodi Picoult Writes: One Question, Many Voices
Most Picoult novels begin with a question that has no comfortable answer: should a child be made to donate a kidney, can an old man atone for the Holocaust, what does a hospital owe a Black nurse its patients refuse. She has said her concern is “what constitutes the truth—how well we think we know the people we love”. Many of the books are built towards a trial, as in The Pact, My Sister’s Keeper, Nineteen Minutes, House Rules, Small Great Things and Mad Honey, so that every side of the question gets heard in court.
She tells her stories in alternating first-person chapters. Her first novel was subtitled “A Novel in Five Voices”; Small Great Things gives a voice to the nurse, her lawyer and the white supremacist father. She researches each subject at first hand: survivor interviews for The Storyteller, conversations with women of colour and two former skinheads for Small Great Things, and for Wish You Were Here a young Scot who was stranded on the Galápagos in 2020, and the families who hosted him.
She also plays with structure. A Spark of Light runs backwards through the hours of a hostage siege, The Book of Two Ways splits into two possible lives, and many books turn on a late reveal that recasts what came before. For writers who work on the same ground, see Authors like Jodi Picoult.
Watch
Jodi Picoult on By Any Other Name
On 20 August 2024, the day By Any Other Name was published, Picoult talked with George Stephanopoulos for ABC News about the novel and about Emilia Bassano, the woman at its centre.
Frequently asked questions about Jodi Picoult’s books
How many books has Jodi Picoult written?
This page lists 33 books: 28 novels for adults (the 14 key books plus 14 more, one of them written with Jennifer Finney Boylan), two young-adult novels written with her daughter Samantha van Leer, a collection of short pieces, a musical play written with her son Jake van Leer, and a Wonder Woman comics run. Her newest novel is Hollow Bones (2026).
What are Jodi Picoult’s books in order?
Her key books in order: The Pact (1998), Plain Truth (2000), My Sister’s Keeper (2004), Nineteen Minutes (2007), Change of Heart (2008), House Rules (2010), The Storyteller (2013), Leaving Time (2014), Small Great Things (2016), A Spark of Light (2018), The Book of Two Ways (2020), Wish You Were Here (2021), Mad Honey (2022) and By Any Other Name (2024). Her first novel was Songs of the Humpback Whale (1992); the full list is in the bibliography further down.
Where should I start with Jodi Picoult?
My Sister’s Keeper (2004) shows her method in its clearest form: a family, a moral question and a courtroom, told by several narrators. If you want something more recent, start with Small Great Things (2016) or, away from the courtroom, The Book of Two Ways (2020).
What is Jodi Picoult’s most famous book?
My Sister’s Keeper (2004), helped by the 2009 film with Cameron Diaz and Abigail Breslin. Nineteen Minutes (2007) was her first novel to debut at No. 1 on the New York Times list, and Small Great Things (2016) is among her most discussed.
Why are Jodi Picoult’s books banned?
In early March 2023 the school district in Martin County, Florida, published a list of more than sixty books removed from its school libraries, twenty of them by Picoult, among them Nineteen Minutes, My Sister’s Keeper and The Storyteller. Picoult called it “a shocking breach of freedom of speech and freedom of information”. PEN America named Nineteen Minutes the most banned book in US schools in the 2023–24 school year; Picoult says the objection is usually a single page describing a date rape.
Which Jodi Picoult books have been made into films?
My Sister’s Keeper was released in cinemas in 2009. Lifetime made television films of The Pact (2002), Plain Truth (2004), The Tenth Circle (2008) and Salem Falls (2011). Netflix bought the film rights to Wish You Were Here (2021).
Is the My Sister’s Keeper film different from the book?
Yes. Nick Cassavetes’s 2009 film changes the ending of the novel and gives more or less weight to some subplots. Picoult did not approve of the changes.
Are Jodi Picoult’s books connected?
Her novels are standalone, but a few characters return. The lawyer Jordan McAfee appears in The Pact and Nineteen Minutes, and Ian Fletcher from Keeping Faith returns in Change of Heart. Between the Lines (2012) and Off the Page (2015), written with her daughter, are a two-book series.
Who wrote Mad Honey with Jodi Picoult?
Jennifer Finney Boylan, the novelist and author of the memoir She’s Not There. Boylan dreamed she was writing a book with Picoult and posted about it; Picoult got in touch and they agreed to do it. Picoult wrote Olivia, the mother, and Boylan wrote Lily, the girl at the centre of the case.
Is Jodi Picoult still alive?
Yes. She was born on 19 May 1966 in Nesconset, on Long Island, New York, and lives in Hanover, New Hampshire. Her newest novel, Hollow Bones, was published on 15 September 2026.
Footnotes
- Jodi Picoult — Wikipedia
- Nineteen Minutes — Wikipedia
- These books are banned in Martin County, Florida — PEN America, 2023
- Small Great Things — jodipicoult.com
- Jodi Picoult novelizes the pandemic in Wish You Were Here — NPR, 2021
- Jodi Picoult — EBSCO Research Starters
Bibliography last verified 9 October 2026. Where sources give different first-publication years, this page uses the year in library catalogues or the publisher’s own record.
This list was not put together by a machine.
The notes are all mine,
and the books are all hers.
Lisanne x
Written by Lisanne Swart, who has curated reading lists and author guides at lisanneswart.com since 2021.
See more on her personal bookshelf.
“In my first memory, I am three years old and I am trying to kill my sister.”
— Jodi Picoult, My Sister’s Keeper (2004), the first line of the prologue
If this shelf interested you, the full bookshelf has more: reading lists by theme, author guides, and notes on what is actually worth your time.
Browse the full bookshelf Get book recommendations