How could bestselling US author Jodi Picoult ever have known that when she set out to write her fourteenth novel, based on a school shooting, that it would be released days before the tragic Virginia school massacre, making her work of fiction more raw and real than any of her previous ones?

Reading each line and each personal story while the real thing unfolded before our very eyes made it a more disturbing and all too graphic reminder of just how cruel life can be and just how gifted a writer Picoult is.

Since the phenomenal success of her novel ‘My Sister’s Keeper’, Picoult has seen the re-release of her previous novels ‘Second Glance’, ‘Salem Falls’, ‘Keeping Faith’, ‘Plain Truth’ and ‘The Tenth Circle’ to name but a few.

But it is the newly-published ‘Nineteen Minutes’ and the recent real-life tragedy that forced her to issue a statement directed at the victims of the worst school shooting in US history, which saw the death of over thirty people.

“As a parent, my deepest sympathy goes out to the victims and families of the Virginia Tech community,” she said recently. “Although shootings on college campuses are often motivated by different factors than the ones I researched for high school shootings in ‘Nineteen Minutes’, any time something like this happens it is tragic and raises questions. However, the one we should be asking right now is: How can we help this community heal?”

In what has been described as an ‘emotionally charged novel’, Picoult delves beneath the surface of a small town to explore what it means to be different in our society.

Sterling, New Hampshire is where seventeen year old high school student Peter Houghton has endured years of verbal and physical abuse at the hands of his classmates. One day it all gets too much for Peter and armed with a loaded gun he goes to school and fires indiscriminately, killing ten people and injuring many more.

As with previous Picoult novels there is intrigue, suspense and surprise around every corner and readers will be kept gripped to the end.

Speaking exclusively to ‘NewsFour’, Jodi said of her recent trip to Dublin. “I went to a lot of bookstores, and did a wonderful event one night. I also got to catch up and have dinner with an old college friend of mine who’s temporarily living in Dublin! As always, the people of Ireland were charming and welcoming– it’s always a treat to visit.”

When researching for ‘Nineteen Minutes’ she discovered that contrary to being the stereotypical ‘loner’ or ‘crazed gunman’, the person holding the firearm may not be any different to you or me.

“Although the media is quick to list the ‘aberrant’ characteristics of a school shooter, the truth is that they fit all teens at some point in their adolescence. Or in other words– these kids who resort to violence are not all that different from the one living upstairs in your own house, most likely– as scary as that is to imagine.

“Two other facts that surprised me: for many of these shooters, there is the thinnest line between suicide and homicide. They go to the school planning to kill themselves and decide at the last minute to shoot others too. And that, psychologically, a single act of childhood bullying is as scarring emotionally as a single act of sexual abuse.

“From the point of view of the survivors, I remember being stunned when this young man I interviewed said that afterward, when his parents were trying to be solicitous and ask him if he needed anything, he turned away from them. He was angry that they hadn’t been like that yesterday, before the event.

“Historically, one of the most upsetting things I learned was that after Columbine, more than one family was told that their child was the first to be killed. It was theoretically supposed to offer them comfort (‘my child went first, and didn’t suffer’) but backfired when several families realised they’d been told the same thing.”

As the successful author of fourteen bestselling novels and mother of three children just how does this busy mother continuously come up with good original ideas? “The right idea is the one you can’t stop thinking about; the one that’s in your head first thing in the morning,” she reveals. “The ideas choose me, not the other way around. And as for a shortage I haven’t faced that yet. I could tell you what the next four books I’m writing will address.”

‘Ninteen Minutes’ is published by Hodder & Stoughton. www.jodipicoult.com and is available from Books on the Green.