An astonishing novel about redemption and forgiveness from the "amazingly talented writer" (HuffPost) and #1 New York Times bestselling author Jodi Picoult. Some stories live forever... Sage Singer is a baker. She works through the night, preparing the day's breads and pastries, trying to escape a reality of loneliness, bad memories, and the shadow of her mother's death. When Josef Weber, an elderly man in Sage's grief support group, begins stopping by the bakery, they strike up an unlikely friendship. Despite their differences, they see in each other the hidden scars that others can't. Everything changes on the day that Josef confesses a long-buried and shame-ful secret and asks Sage for an extraordinary favor. If she says yes, she faces not only moral repercussions, but potentially legal ones as well. With the integrity of the closest friend she's ever had clouded, Sage begins to question the assumptions and expectations she's made about her life and her family. In this searingly honest novel, Jodi Picoult gracefully explores the lengths to which we will go in order to keep the past from dictating the future. Product DetailsISBN-13: 9781439102770 Media Type: Paperback Publisher: Atria/Emily Bestler Books Publication Date: 11-05-2013 Pages: 480 Product Dimensions: 5.10(w) x 8.20(h) x 1.30(d)About the Author Jodi Picoult received an AB in creative writing from Princeton and a master’s degree in education from Harvard. The recipient of the 2003 New England Book Award for her entire body of work, she is the author of twenty-seven novels, including the #1 New York Times bestsellers House Rules, Handle With Care, Change of Heart, and My Sister’s Keeper, for which she received the American Library Association’s Margaret Alexander Edwards Award. She lives in New Hampshire with her husband and three children. Visit her website at JodiPicoult.com.Read an Excerpt Read an Excerpt 1. Sage Damian held his hand high, as his soldiers laughed behind him. I tried to leap to reach the coins, but I couldn’t, and stumbled. Although it was only October, there was a hint of winter in the air, and my hands were numb with the cold. Damian’s arm snaked around me, a vise, pressing me along the length of his body. I could feel the silver buttons of his uniform cutting into my skin. “Let me go,” I said through my teeth. “Now, now,” he said, grinning. “Is that any way to speak to a paying customer?” It was the last baguette. Once I got his money, I could go back home to my father. I looked around at the other merchants. Old Sal was stirring the dregs of herring left in her barrel; Farouk was folding his silks, studiously avoiding the confrontation. They knew better than to make an enemy of the captain of the guard. “Where are your manners, Ania?” Damian chided. “Please!” He tossed a glance at his soldiers. “It sounds good when she begs for me, doesn’t it?” Other girls rhapsodized about his striking silver eyes, about whether his hair was as black as night or as black as the wing of a raven, about a smile so full of sorcery it could rob you of your thoughts and speech, but I did not see the attraction. Damian might have been one of the most eligible men in the village, but he reminded me of the pumpkins left too long on the porch after All Hallows’ Eve—lovely to look at, until you touched one and realized it was rotten to the core. Unfortunately, Damian liked a challenge. And since I was the only woman between ten years and a hundred who wasn’t swayed by his charm, he had targeted me. He brought down his hand, the one holding the coins, and curled it around my throat. I could feel the silver pressing into the pulse at my neck. He pinned me against the scrubwood of the vegetable seller’s cart, as if he wanted to remind me how easy it would be to kill me, how much stronger he was. But then he leaned forward. Marry me, he whispered, and you’ll never have to worry about taxes again. Still gripping me by the throat, he kissed me. I bit his lip so hard that he bled. As soon as he let go of me, I grabbed the empty basket I used to carry bread back and forth to the market, and I started to run. I would not tell my father, I decided. He had enough to worry about. The further I got into the woods, the more I could smell the peat burning in the fireplace of our cottage. In moments, I would be back home, and my father would hand me the special roll that he had baked for me. I would sit at the counter and tell him about the characters in the village: the mother who became frantic when her twins hid beneath Farouk’s bolts of silk; Fat Teddy, who insisted on sampling the cheese at each market stall, filled his belly in the process, and never bought a single item. I would tell him about the man I had never seen before, who had come to the market with a teenage boy who looked to be his brother. But the boy was feebleminded; he wore a leather helmet that covered his nose and mouth, leaving only holes for breathing, and a leather cuff around his wrist, so that his older brother could keep him close by holding tight to a leash. The man strode past my bread stand and the vegetable seller and the other sundries, intent on reaching the meat stall, where he asked for a rack of ribs. When he did not have enough coins to pay, he shrugged out of his woolen coat. Take this, he said. It’s all I have. As he shivered back across the square, his brother grabbed for the wrapped parcel of meat. You can have it soon, he promised, and then I lost sight of him. My father would make up a story for them: They jumped off a circus train and wound up here. They were assassins, scoping out Baruch Beiler’s mansion. I would laugh and eat my roll, warming myself in front of the fire while my father mixed the next batch of dough. There was a stream that separated the cottage from the house, and my father had placed a wide plank across it so that we could get from one side to the other. But today, when I reached it, I bent to drink, to wash away the bitter taste of Damian that was still on my lips. The water ran red. I set down the basket I was carrying and followed the bank upstream, my boots sinking into the spongy marsh. And then I saw it. The man was lying on his back, the bottom half of his body submerged in the water. His throat and his chest had been torn open. His veins were tributaries, his arteries mapped a place I never wanted to go. I started to scream. There was blood, so much blood that it painted his face and stained his hair. There was blood, so much blood that several moments passed before I recognized my father. Show More Reading Group Guide Reading Group Guide The Storyteller By Jodi Picoult Reading Group Discussion Guide This reading group guide for The Storyteller includes an introduction, discussion questions, and ideas for enhancing your book club. The suggested questions are intended to help your reading group find new and interesting angles and topics for your discussion. We hope that these ideas will enrich your conversation and increase your enjoyment of the book. Introduction When Sage Singer learns that the elderly widower she befriends in her grief group is a regular customer at Our Daily Bread, where she is the baker extraordinaire, it is not all that remarkable. In their tight-knit community of Westerbrook, New Hampshire, Josef Weber is widely known and beloved as the retired German teacher and a little league coach. But when Josef unexpectedly implores Sage to kill him, she could not be more surprised. Josef confesses to Sage his darkest secret: that he deserves to die at her hands because he was a member of the SS guard in Nazi Germany a lifetime ago, and because she is a Jew. As Sage considers Josef’s request, she reflects on the sacrifices made by her grandmother, Minka, a Holocaust survivor, and on the millions of other victims of the Nazi genocide. Confused, Sage seeks help from Leo Stein, a Justice Department attorney tasked with bringing war criminals to international tribunals. When Leo encourages Sage to connect the dots between her grandmother’s experiences at Auschwitz and those in Josef Weber’s story, she must first face her own moral failings and confront her own beliefs about the true meaning of justice. Topics & Questions for Discussion 1. The Storyteller opens with a story within a story: the gripping narrative that Minka Singer composes: first as a young student in Lodz, then from the ghetto where her family finds itself exiled, and finally, during her imprisonment at Auschwitz. How does the tale of Ania and Aleksander and Casmir Lubov intersect with the plot of the larger novel? In what ways does this fantastical tale of two brothers and the myth of the upior connect with the brutality of the Holocaust and the ongoing hunt for Nazi war criminals? 2. “Josef Weber is as close as you can get to being canonized while you’re still alive. Everyone in Westerbrook knows him…[h]e’s everyone’s adoptive cuddly grandfather.” (p. 22) How does Mary’s estimation of Josef Weber square with what Sage learns of him? How is Josef Weber’s public persona incompatible with the truths that he reveals to Sage? To what extent is it possible for someone who hides a terrible secret to be so seemingly good? 3. By way of explaining her self-imposed solitude, Sage reveals her dramatic facial scar to Josef Weber, in spite of her general embarrassment about her disfigurement. What is it about Josef Weber that Sage finds herself drawn to? To what extent does the genesis of their friendship seem entirely coincidental? At what point in the novel does Sage start being his friend and at what point does she stop? 4. “One of the first things Adam told me was that I was pretty, which should have been my first clue that he was a liar.” (p. 25) Is Sage’s extramarital relationship with Adam consistent with her character’s values? What does their affair offer her? To what extent does Adam’s love for Sage seem genuine? How does he seem to embody the qualities of