Life or death ...

The Centre for Women’s Reproductive Health offers a last chance for hope – but nobody ends up there by choice.

Its very existence is controversial, and to the demonstrators who barricade the building every day, the service it offers is no different from legalised murder.

Now life and death decisions are being made horrifyingly real: a lone protester with a gun has taken the staff, patients and visitors hostage.

Starting at the tensest moment in the negotiations for their release, A Spark of Light unravels backwards, revealing hour by urgent hour what brought each of these people – the gunman, the negotiator, the doctors, nurses and women who have come to them for treatment – to this point.

And certainties unwind as truths and secrets are peeled away, revealing the complexity of balancing the right to life with the right to choose.

Jodi Picoult is the author of 24 internationally bestselling novels, including My Sister’s Keeper, The Storyteller and Small Great Things, and has also co-written two books with her daughter Samantha van Leer, Between the Lines and Off the Page. She lives in New Hampshire with her husband and children.