Hollow Bones by Jodi Picoult is an emotionally charged contemporary family drama that moves between the past and present to explore themes of trauma, motherhood, and the self-protective narratives we build.

I reach up and unravel my braid. When my hair is loose and whipping around my face, I take the red ribbon I’ve woven through it and press it just beneath my mother’s etched name, underlining. She was here. She was mine.

When Molly Fitzgerald was two months old, her mother went to a morning appointment in downtown New York. Like so many who left their homes on September 11^th, 2001, Molly’s mother never came home.

Now Molly saves lives for a living, running a department for when disasters strike. Molly and her husband Jesse—a police polygraph expert with his own fractured family—have found a love that is a solace in a dangerous world.

But then Molly’s whole world is turned on its head. She’s spent her life preparing for catastrophe. But nothing could prepare her when a disaster strikes too close to home.

In this powerful novel, Jodi Picoult tells an epic story of the lies we tell ourselves, the plans we design to protect ourselves at the worst moments, and the ties that bind mothers and daughters.