After months and months of being asked by readers, "When's the next book coming out?" I can finally tell you: The Book of Two Ways will hit shelves on 9/22! It's a story about life, death, love — and the "one who got away." I've wanted to write this book for about a decade now, ever since my son Kyle was majoring in Egyptology at Yale. He started telling me about something called The Book of Two Ways — and I immediately thought, "That's such a great title for a book." THEN I learned more about it — we've all heard of the Book of the Dead — the funerary texts used in the New Kingdom of Egypt. They evolved from earlier funerary texts — first the Pyramid Texts from the Old Kingdom, which were papyrus scrolls buried with kings ... and then the Coffin Texts in the Middle Kingdom, spells written in the cedar coffins of governors and the like. Some of those coffins included the Book of Two Ways — the first officially known map of the afterlife. Usually drawn on the bottom of the coffin, they incorporated a wave blue line and a wavy black line, separated by a red "lake of fire." The idea was that the deceased could take either the blue water route OR the black land route in order to reach Osiris (lord of the Netherworld) and to be one with Re, the sun god. No matter which path you took, you'd wind up in the same place. The catch was that there were terrible monsters and obstacles and pitfalls, and you had to have the knowledge of how to evade those to get to your destination. Cool, right? I started to imagine how that might apply, structurally, to a woman who is perfectly happy with where life has taken her ... until she almost dies, and finds herself wondering about what might have been. For those of you who are Egypt buffs — you'll learn a lot about Egyptology! But in the spirit of other novels of mine, it examines yet another topic we all shy away from, but which is inevitable: how to have a good death. This book was a beast to write, and feels sweeping and epic, and I cannot wait to share it with you! See below for details on pre-ordering a copy now!
XO,
Jodi (email on 1-28-2020)
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| Jodi Picoult emerging from a pyramid |
Everything changes in a single moment for Dawn Edelstein. She's on a plane when the flight attendant makes an announcement: prepare for a crash landing. She braces herself as thoughts flash through her mind. The shocking thing is, the thoughts are not of her husband, but a man she last saw fifteen years ago: Wyatt Armstrong.
Dawn, miraculously, survives the crash, but so do all the doubts that have suddenly been raised. She has led a good life. Back in Boston, there is her husband, Brian, her beloved daughter, and her work as a death doula, where she helps ease the transition between life and death for her clients.
But somewhere in Egypt is Wyatt Armstrong, who works as an archaeologist unearthing ancient burial sites, a job she once studied for, but was forced to abandon when life suddenly intervened. And now, when it seems that fate is offering her second chances, she is not as sure of the choice she once made.
I was happy the date of publication was getting closer. I've had this waiting to be posted on my blog since the end of January, which was weeks before the pandemic and lockdown hit the world.
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| A whole wall of wrestling holds |
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| Heiroglyphs for linear time and cyclical time |
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| Heiroglyph for mother |
Read an excerpt of the book here, on Jodi Picoult's website.
3 comments:
This could be a good book to read now as the pandemic has given people time and maybe opportunities to change their life's path. I want to read it too!
I like hearing how authors came to write their books. The back story adds to my appreciation of reading the novel.
I'm looking forward to reading this one!
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