My Sister's Keeper

Anna Fitzgerald was designed before she was born — conceived through genetic selection to be a perfect biological match for her older sister, Kate, who has leukemia. For thirteen years, she has donated bone marrow, blood, and stem cells without being asked. Now she's asking a question that will fracture her family: what happens when the person who has given everything decides she wants her own body back? Picoult builds her story around a wrongful-termination lawsuit that is really a moral referendum on what parents owe their children — and what children owe each other — when love and survival are in direct conflict.

What sets this novel apart is its architecture. Picoult gives each major character a dedicated point-of-view chapter, and each narrator — Anna, their mother Sara, their father Brian, their brother Jesse, the lawyer, the guardian ad litem — sees the same family completely differently. The effect is not confusion but accumulation: you understand, uncomfortably, how every person in this story can be both right and wrong at the same time. The prose is direct and unsparing, and Picoult resists the temptation to resolve the ethical knot at the center of the book into something clean. She earns the difficulty she puts you through.