From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of By Any Other Name comes a gripping novel about the risks we take to protect the people we love — in a world where the next crisis is never far away.
On September 11, 2001, two-month-old Molly Fitzgerald’s mother went to an appointment at the World Trade Center and never came home. Her father and the stepmother who raised her loved her fiercely, but Molly grew up with a bone-deep fear of disaster.
Now she runs Rhode Island’s Department for Emergency Preparedness, mapping out how to save lives when storms, epidemics, and crashes arrive. She and her husband, Jesse — a police polygraph expert carrying his own history of crisis — have built a love that feels like shelter. Then the unexpected knocks that shelter apart, and both of them are forced to question the stories they’ve been telling themselves.
Moving between past and present, Hollow Bones is about the plans we make to stay safe, the lies we need in order to keep going, and the unbreakable, complicated ties between mothers and daughters.
For readers who want Picoult at her most searching: family secrets, moral gray zones, and the question of how far you’ll go to keep the people you love from falling.