A family affair

Novelist Jodi Picoult has written a book with her daughter. Hannah Stephenson reports

JODI Picoult’s stories of sexual abuse, assisted suicide, school shootings and organ donation don’t often end happily. But now, Picoult, with her 16-year-old daughter, Samantha Van Leer, has co-written a fairytale for young adults. Has Britain’s biggest-selling female-adult-fiction author gone soft?

Between The Lines involves a prince, Oliver, trying to escape the pages of the book in which he ‘lives’ to make contact with Delilah, a 15-year-old loner. She is shunned by her classmates and obsessed with Oliver’s book.