A Bookworld Top Pick for Christmas - the new Jodi Picoult novel Leaving Time is another brilliantly crafted novel from one of the world's favourite writers. 

The gripping story of a daughter searching for her missing mother - one of Jodi Picoult's most powerful and affecting novels yet.

Alice Metcalf was a devoted mother, loving wife and accomplished scientist who studied grief among elephants. Yet it's been a decade since she disappeared under mysterious circumstances, leaving behind her small daughter, husband, and the animals to which she devoted her life. All signs point to abandonment - or worse.

Still Jenna - now thirteen years old and truly orphaned by a father maddened by grief - steadfastly refuses to believe in her mother's desertion. So she decides to approach the two people who might still be able to help her find Alice: a disgraced psychic named Serenity Jones, and Virgil Stanhope, the cynical detective who first investigated her mother's disappearance and the strange, possibly linked death of one of her mother's coworkers.

Together these three lonely souls will discover truths destined to forever change their lives. Deeply moving and suspenseful, Jodi Picoult's 21st novel is a radiant exploration of the enduring love between mothers and daughters.

A conversation with Jodi about Leaving Time:

I started to write Leaving Time when I was in the process of becoming an empty-nester. My daughter Sammy was headed off to school. I was thinking a lot of how we humans raise our kids to be self sufficient enough to leave us – and how depressing it was for those who were left behind. That theme – of what happens to the people who are left behind – became what I wanted to write about. Then, I was reading something and learned that in the wild, an elephant mother and daughter stay together their whole lives until one of them dies. Given my frame of mind, it seemed so much more pleasant to do things the way elephants do. I began to dig a bit more about elephants, and their reaction to death, and what I uncovered became a metaphor for the novel.

For the character of Alice, who studies elephant cognition, I went first to a professor at Vassar – Abigail Baird – who taught me all about the brain and how memory works. Then, we ventured to Botswana to work with Jeanetta Selier, a Ph.D. researcher who studies herds in the Tuli block. You probably know a lot about elephants already – like the fact that they are the largest land mammals, 7-10K pounds. They’re herbivores. They are recognizable by tusks, hair, voice, and ears – elephant ears are as individual as human fingerprints. They live for 50-70 years in the wild, and adult females live in herds made of a matriarch – the oldest and biggest elephant – and two to ten females. Babies are allomothered, which means that they are cared for by all females in the herd, and older siblings get to practice their parenting skills before actually becoming moms. Male elephants are chased from the herd at about age 13 by the matriarch, when they first come into musth, a state where they get very aggressive and want to mate. They roam with small groups of males.

What you may NOT know about elephants is that they have an incredibly complex brain, capable of communicating, learning, remembering, and experiencing fear, pain and loss. In Kenya, there are two tribes that interact with the elephants frequently. The Masaai use spears to hunt them, and wear red. The Kamba are farmers who don’t hunt elephant. Scientists have proven that elephants can distinguish between the two groups by smell and sight. Herds showed greater fear when showed red garments – which suggests cognitive capacity and long term memory. Even elephants who had no direct experience with Masaai reacted this way, suggesting social learning and communication.

Joyce Poole, a famous elephant researcher, has done studies of empathy in elephants. She recounts how one elephant flinched when another reached toward an electric fence, even though the fence was inactive. There have been multiple reports of elephants helping to free rhino babies caught in a mud hole, although there is no evolutionary advantage to that behavior. They refuse to leave sick or injured elephants behind, even if the sick animal is not related to them.

The memory of an elephant? Turns out it’s a real thing. At the Elephant Sanctuary in TN, elephants reacted so badly to helicopters and planes that they had to institute a no fly zone overhead. The only helicopters most of these elephants would have ever encountered was 40-50 years prior, during the culls when they were captured and brought to the US.

The relationships of elephants last a lifetime. At The Elephant Sanctuary in TN, an elephant named Jenny was living peacefully when a new elephant, Shirley, arrived. When Shirley came into the barn that night, in the stall beside Jenny’s, Jenny began to pound at the bars between them, trying to get to Shirley. The caregivers eventually opened the gate between them and immediately Shirley and Jenny began to move in tandem – staying inseparable. When Jenny lay down to sleep, Shirley would straddle her, like a mother elephant would a calf. It turned out that when Jenny was a calf and Shirley was 30, they had both been at the same circus for a brief while. They had been separated for 22 years, but recognized each other. In Pilanesberg in S. Africa, there was a reserve for elephants who had been orphaned after culls for population control. But putting together a bunch of teen elephants didn’t work, and two matriarchs were brought over from the US, where they had been trained and living. Sixteen years passed, and these two matriarchs managed to whip the teen elephants into herd formation, going without human contact for 16 years. Then, one of the elephants, Owalla, was bitten by a hippo. For medical reasons she couldn’t be sedated and researchers knew she would die if not treated. Worse, if she died, the fragile herd would likely fall apart again. Desperate, they reached out to Randall Moore – the original trainer of Owalla, who had not seen her for over a decade. He flew to Pilanesberg, got out of his vehicle, and called Owalla’s name. While her herd ran away, terrified, Owalla greeted Randall, following his commands to lift her trunk and stay still so she could be treated by a vet without anesthetic.

Elephants have elaborate rituals of grief, much like humans. If an elephant comes across the bones of another elephant, it will be quiet and reverential. The tail and ears will droop. They will pick up the bones and roll them beneath their hind feet. They only do this with elephant bones, not the bones of other animals. They will return to the spot of a herd member’s passing and pay respects for years to come. They will often cover an elephant who dies with branches and dirt. They’ve been known to break into research camps to steal a bone a scientist is working with, and to return it to the spot of that elephant’s demise. But the most lovely story of grief I learned came from the Elephant Sanctuary. An elephant named Sissy survived the 1981 Gainesville flood and was brought, traumatized, to the Sanctuary. She took to carrying a tire around, like a pacifier. After a while, she befriended another elephant there named Tina. When Tina died, Sissy stayed at her grave for a day. Then, she lay her tire down on her best friend’s grave, like a wreath, and left – almost as if she knew that Tina was the one who needed comfort, now.

If you learn this much about elephants, you can’t NOT be moved by their plight in both captivity and the wild. The point of zoos was to develop breeding programs and more importantly to encourage conservation of animals that might not be indigenous to a country.  However, the need for this has been reduced as the internet has developed.  Any school kid, for example, can learn about elephants in Africa with a click.  Elephants suffer greatly in captivity.  The zoo habitat is never large enough to accommodate an elephant.  Moreover, elephants live in herds, so creating a "fake herd" of two of three elephants is much like throwing a human into a cell with a stranger and assuming they will be fast friends.  75% of elephants in North American zoos are overweight, 40% have foot or joint problems, and 80% have behavioral tics like head bobbing or swaying due to stress.  For every elephant born in a zoo, another two die -- so even saying that zoos foster breeding programs is not quite accurate.  Ideally, elephants should not be in zoos.  Sanctuaries allow an elephant to live out the rest of its life in a habitat that is hundreds of acres, and to not be on display -- in sanctuaries, elephants set their time for coming and going.  

Of course, elephants in the wild are not thriving either.  In Africa, 38K elephants are killed each year by poachers.  The first hint that a population is being poached is a disparity between females and males – because poachers go for the biggest tusks. Once all the males are gone, the poachers go after the matriarchs – but the collateral damage of losing a matriarch is huge. If a matriarch dies, so does the collective knowledge of that family, and the society disintegrates. The herd won’t know where the best water holes are, in times of drought. They won’t know the safest travel corridors. Any nursing babies die if their mothers are killed. Right now the estimate is that in ten years there will be no more African elephants.

But poaching isn’t just a wildlife crisis – it’s a humanitarian concern. The price of an ounce of ivory has skyrocketed from $150 to $1300, due to demand from the Far East (Southeast Asia and China).   Money from poaching fuels instability in Democratic African Republic, and there are rumors that Joseph Kony’s Lord’s Resistance Army was funded with the proceeds of illegal ivory from the Democratic Republic of Congo. And lest you think poaching doesn't matter here in the US, every month 1-3 tons of ivory is poached by members of Al Shabaab, a terrorist group in Somalia with clear links to Al Quaeda.

So how do we save these magnificent, intelligent animals? We need to continue to spread the word about poaching, as Tusk and the Clinton Global Initiative have done.  The UN has created a resolution saying that poaching fuels instability in countries, and President Obama banned ivory trade in the US.  China even destroyed stores of illegal ivory, crushing it, which set a great example. This is all a good start.  But in addition, the countries where poaching is the worst needs to offer their farmers an economic alternative to the one being offered by poachers.  Local governments need to see that the cost of losing tourism will far exceed the immediate cash flow of poaching elephants, and need to create punishments for poachers that reflect this.  At the same time, those who demand ivory need to be educated about the reality of poaching -- many believe that an elephant can regrow a tusk, which is not true; the only way to get an elephant tusk is to kill the elephant.  Here in the US, if you are concerned about elephants, donate time and money to an accredited antipoaching organization.  And write your congressional representatives and tell them to support the presidential initiative against poaching.  Because I promise you – once you read LEAVING TIME, you’re never going to think about elephants quite the same way.