#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A deeply moving, gripping, and intelligent page-turner about a daughter’s search for her mother, Leaving Time is Jodi Picoult at the height of her powers.
Throughout her blockbuster career, 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 Leaving Time, she has delivered 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.
Praise for Leaving Time
“Piercing and uplifting . . . a smart, accessible yarn with a suspenseful puzzle at its core.”—The Boston Globe
“Poignant . . . an entertaining tale about parental love, friendship, loss.”—The Washington Post
“In Jenna, [Jodi] Picoult has created an unforgettable character who will easily endear herself to each and every reader. . . . Leaving Time may be her finest work yet.”—Bookreporter
Jodi Picoult is one of the finest storytellers in the world. I feel so lucky that I get to read her books because she very rarely disappoints. I haven’t read all of her books (yet) but of all the ones I have read, they’ve been fantastic. And while she does the law stories really well, sometimes it’s the other stories she writes that are just as incredible. Leaving Time is one I missed when it was first released - I own it, of course, I just haven’t read it, and it was simply phenomenal.
Leaving Time tells the story of 13-year-old Jenna. Her mom disappeared when she was three, her dad is in a residential care home and she can’t help but wonder what happened that fateful night at the elephant sanctuary her parents owned. So she tracks down local psychic Serenity and ex-cop-turned-PI Virgil and they set off to uncover exactly what happened to Jenna’s mom that night years ago.
Leaving Time is basically a mystery but wrapped up in the mystery, we learn how Jenna’s mom Alice is a renowned elephant expert. She spent years in Africa studying them before shifting her focus to grief in elephants and then when she met and fell in love with Thomas, she moved to New Hampshire to be with him at his elephant sanctuary, they’re such a big part of the novel and I learned so much about them whilst reading. Things I hadn’t even known or would have thought to wonder. They are magnificent creatures and I have a new and massive respect for them. I felt so connected to the characters via their work and love of elephants and that really speaks to how Picoult writes. She really makes you care.
I had thoughts about how Leaving Time would end, thoughts about what had happened to Jenna’s mother but I couldn’t have been further from the truth. Picoult is known for pulling a bait and switch and nobody does it quite like she does and in Leaving Time she just about broke my heart. I don’t know how Picoult does it, but I very rarely see where she’s going when she’s writing, and this was no different. Picoult really is a magnificent writer, one of the best of this generation, and Leaving Time shows off her skills excellently.
