Love Kristin Hannah? Her Fans Want You To Read These 4 Unputdownable Jodi Picoult Books Next
If you’re riveted by the Lindsay Clancy trial, check out the fourth pick
Key Takeaways
- Picoult’s 'The Storyteller' is the ultimate WWII match for The Nightingale fans.
- Both authors excel at writing resilient women facing impossible moral dilemmas.
- New release 'Hollow Bones' mirrors themes in 'Winter Garden'—and the Lindsay Clancy trial.
From The Women and The Nightingale to Winter Garden and The Great Alone— Kristin Hannah’s bestsellers are famous for strong heroines, emotional punch and page-turning suspense. Want to try another author with the same power to move us? Diehard Kristin Hannah fans enthusiastically suggest Jodi Picoult.
Like Hannah, Picoult has spent the last 30+ years weaving deeply moving stories of love, family loyalty and ordinary people facing extraordinary circumstances. If you haven’t discovered Picoult yet or just haven’t read any of her work recently, we’re here to help you find your next great read by comparing Picoult’s fan favorites to Hannah’s most beloved books. Oh and one mini-spoiler: If you’re avidly following the Lindsay Clancy trial, you’ll want to keep scrolling to the last recommendation.
If you loved The Nightingale, consider The Storyteller
Both of these gripping novels center on impossible choices made during World War II, and both brilliantly toggle between past and present. Both force characters and readers alike to wrestle with themes of guilt, complicity and forgiveness.
While The Nightingale focuses heavily on resistance and survival, The Storyteller opens with a gut-wrenching premise: a young Jewish baker strikes up an unlikely friendship with a beloved old man in her small New Hampshire town, who then confesses he was an SS officer and asks her to kill him.
Picoult layers in a federal war crimes investigation alongside a grandmother’s harrowing first-person account of Auschwitz. Readers call it “raw, heartbreaking and so thought provoking”—a book that “seeps into your bones and leaves a permanent imprint on your heart.” It holds a 4.30 on Goodreads from over 286,000 ratings, with 48% five-star reviews.
If you loved The Women, check out Small Great Things
Captivated by Frankie McGrath’s fierce dedication as a combat nurse in The Women? Then the high-stakes medical drama in Small Great Things will definitely grab you. The novel follows Ruth Jefferson, a highly skilled Black labor and delivery nurse who is ordered not to touch the newborn of a white supremacist couple. When the baby’s health takes a devastating turn, the story does too.
Where Hannah uses the Vietnam War to examine what America asks of women, Picoult uses the American justice system. Both authors are unsparing. Neither offers easy answers. Readers praise Small Great Things as an “eye-opening, uncomfortable and deeply necessary masterclass in perspective.” Much like The Women, it is an unputdownable tale about female resilience, systemic injustice and the immense courage it takes to stand up and speak the truth. It holds an impressive 4.36 rating on Goodreads with over 459,000 reviews.
If you loved The Great Alone, pick up Handle With Care
Anyone who was swept away by the emotional storm of The Great Alone needs Picoult’s Handle With Care on her TBR list immediately. The Great Alone is, at its core, a story about a marriage where love and destruction are inseparable—and a daughter trapped inside it. Handle With Care lives in that same suffocating space.
When Willow O’Keefe is born with a genetic condition that will cause her to suffer hundreds of broken bones and excruciating pain throughout her life, her parents’ marriage begins to fracture under the weight of it. Willow’s mother makes a decision so shocking it threatens to destroy everything and everyone she loves, including the daughter she’s trying to protect.
Both books ask the same devastating question: how much damage can love do when it has nowhere healthy to go? And both refuse to let you off the hook with an easy answer.
Handle With Care holds a 4.01 on Goodreads from over 141,000 ratings—lower than some Picoult titles, but with a passionate following that consistently names it one of her most emotionally gutting reads.
If you loved Winter Garden, preorder Hollow Bones
For readers deeply moved by the exploration of maternal trauma and fractured mother-daughter bonds in Winter Garden, Jodi Picoult’s new book Hollow Bones (out September 15) is a must-read.
The connection here is almost uncanny. Winter Garden follows two sisters who discover their cold, unknowable mother was shaped by a secret so devastating it defined everything. Hollow Bones follows the head of Rhode Island’s Department of Emergency Preparedness, whose entire identity is shadowed by a single catastrophic day: September 11, 2001, when her mother went to an appointment at the World Trade Center and never came home. Both center on a mother’s hidden story slowly coming into the light. Both ask what it costs a daughter to live in the long shadow of a trauma she didn’t experience but can’t escape.
Kirkus gave it a starred review, calling it “impressive, important and fun to read.” Booklist, also with a starred review, praised it as “a powerful and deeply affecting exploration of grief, loss, guilt and enduring love.” Woman’s World editors loved it too. And for readers who have been riveted by the Lindsay Clancy trial—a case hinging on what a husband truly knew about his wife’s inner life—the marriage at the center of Hollow Bones will be engrossing.
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