Framingham Barnes & Noble Hosting Author Jodi Picoult Tonight

New York Times bestselling author Jodi Picoult’s newest book Leaving Time is released today.

And tonight, Framingham’s Barnes & Noble will host her at Wayland High at 7.

Editor’s Note: Attendees to the Wayland High event MUST purchase a book in advance at Barnes & Noble Framingham and get a wristband in order to attend.

Her last eight novels have debuted at number one on the New York Times bestseller list.

Picoult, 48, who lives in New Hampshire typical makes a stop in MetroWest the first week a novel is released.

Leaving Time is about a woman’s search to learn about her mother.

According to publisher Ballantine Books: “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.”

Picoult studied creative writing with Mary Morris at Princeton, and had two short stories published in Seventeen magazine while still a student. Realism - and a profound desire to be able to pay the rent - led Picoult to a series of different jobs following her graduation: as a technical writer for a Wall Street brokerage firm, as a copywriter at an ad agency, as an editor at a textbook publisher, and as an 8th grade English teacher - before entering Harvard to pursue a master’s in education. She married Tim Van Leer, whom she had known at Princeton, and it was while she was pregnant with her first child that she wrote her first novel, Songs of the Humpback Whale.