The Wilson Center, Oconomowoc's Books & Company, and Milwaukee's Boswell Book Company present a very special afternoon with Jodi Picoult! The best-selling author of 23 novels will be sharing her new release, A Spark of Light, a powerful and provocative novel about ordinary lives that intersect during a heart-stopping crisis. 

The warm fall day starts like any other at the Center—a women's reproductive health services clinic—its staff offering care to anyone who passes through its doors. Then, in late morning, a desperate and distraught gunman bursts in and opens fire, taking all inside hostage. After rushing to the scene, Hugh McElroy, a police hostage negotiator, sets up a perimeter, and begins making a plan to communicate with the gunman. As his phone vibrates with incoming text messages he glances at it and, to his horror, finds out that his fifteen-year-old daughter, Wren, is inside the clinic. 

But Wren is not alone. She will share the next few hours of her young life with a cast of unforgettable characters: a nurse who calms her own panic in order save the life of a wounded woman; a doctor who does his work not in spite of his faith but because of it, who will find that faith tested as never before; a pro-life protester disguised as a patient, who now stands in the crosshairs of the same rage she herself has felt; a young woman who has come to terminate her pregnancy; and the disturbed individual himself, vowing to be heard. Told in a daring and enthralling narrative structure that counts backward through the hours of the standoff, this is a story that traces its way back to what brought each of these very different individuals to the same place on this fateful day. 

For more information, contact Boswell Books at 414-332-1181.