Nineteen Minutes

You can watch a third of a hockey game, color your hair, and mow the front yard in nineteen minutes. You can fold clothes for a family of five in nineteen minutes, make scones, or get a tooth filled.You have nineteen minutes to either stop the world or simply leap off it. You have nineteen minutes to get retribution.

Up until the day when a startling act of violence upends its complacency, Sterling is a tiny, quiet town in New Hampshire. In the aftermath, the town's citizens need to accept their part in the catastrophe and work for justice before they can start the healing process. For them, there are no longer any clear distinctions between what is true and what is false, good and bad, or insider and outsider. The greatest evidence for the state may be Josie Cormier, the adolescent daughter of the sitting judge, but she is incapable of recalling what transpired in front of her own eyes. As the trial goes on, cracks between the adult world and the high school start to manifest, shattering even the tightest of families and friendships.

Jodi Picoult, a New York Times bestselling novelist, presents her most honest, meaningful, and visceral work to date in Nineteen Minutes. It poses basic issues with no simple solutions, and it is told in the direct way for which she has become known: Can you become a mystery to your own child? In our culture, what does it mean to be different? Is retaliation by a victim ever acceptable? And who, if anybody, is qualified to pass judgment on another person?