Throughout her blockbuster career, #1 New York Times
bestselling author Jodi Picoult has seamlessly blended
nuanced characters, riveting plots, and rich prose,
brilliantly creating stories that “not only provoke the mind
but touch the flawed souls in all of us” (The Boston Globe).
Now, in her highly anticipated new novel, she has delivered
her most affecting work yet—a book unlike anything she’s
written before.
For more than a decade, Jenna Metcalf has never stopped
thinking about her mother, Alice, who mysteriously
disappeared in the wake of a tragic accident. Refusing to
believe she was abandoned, Jenna searches for her mother
regularly online and pores over the pages of Alice’s old
journals. A scientist who studied grief among elephants,
Alice wrote mostly of her research among the animals she
loved, yet Jenna hopes the entries will provide a clue to
her mother’s whereabouts.
Desperate to find the truth, Jenna enlists two unlikely
allies in her quest: Serenity Jones, a psychic who rose to
fame finding missing persons, only to later doubt her gifts,
and Virgil Stanhope, the jaded private detective who’d
originally investigated Alice’s case along with the strange,
possibly linked death of one of her colleagues. As the three
work together to uncover what happened to Alice, they
realize that in asking hard questions, they’ll have to face
even harder answers.
As Jenna’s memories dovetail with the events in her mother’s
journals, the story races to a mesmerizing finish. A deeply
moving, gripping, and intelligent page-turner, Leaving Time
is Jodi Picoult at the height of her powers.