This breathtaking novel from #1 New York Times bestselling author Jodi Picoult asks: Do we love across time, or in spite of it? “Sometimes I wonder....Can a ghost find you, if she wants to?” An intricate tale of love, haunting memories, and renewal, Second Glance begins in current-day Vermont, where an old man puts a piece of land up for sale and unintentionally raises protest from the local Abenaki Indian tribe, who insist it’s a burial ground. When odd, supernatural events plague the town of Comtosook, a ghost hunter is hired by the developer to help convince the residents that there’s nothing spiritual about the property. Enter Ross Wakeman, a suicidal drifter who has put himself in mortal danger time and again. He’s driven his car off a bridge into a lake. He’s been mugged in New York City and struck by lightning in a calm country field. Yet despite his best efforts, life clings to him and pulls him ever deeper into the empty existence he cannot bear since his fiancée’s death in a car crash eight years ago. Ross now lives only for the moment he might once again encounter the woman he loves. But in Comtosook, the only discovery Ross can lay claim to is that of Lia Beaumont, a skittish, mysterious woman who, like Ross, is on a search for something beyond the boundary separating life and death. Thus begins Jodi Picoult’s enthralling and ultimately astonishing story of love, fate, and a crime of passion. Hailed by critics as a “master” storyteller (The Washington Post), Picoult once again “pushes herself, and consequently the reader, to think about the unthinkable” (Denver Post). Second Glance, her eeriest and most engrossing work yet, delves into a virtually unknown chapter of American history—Vermont’s eugenics project of the 1920s and 30s—to provide a compelling study of the things that come back to haunt us—literally and figuratively. Do we love across time, or in spite of it?

ジョディ・ピコーの描く世界は、常に倫理の境界線を揺さぶります。本作は、かつて米国で行われた「優生学」という歴史の暗部を背景に、科学の傲慢さと人間の情念を鮮烈に描いています。愛する者を失い絶望する男が過去の悲劇と共鳴する時、読者は歴史が今もなお現在進行形で魂を縛り続ける「負の遺産」である事実に、深い戦慄を覚えるはずです。 緻密な構成で綴られるのは、死の境界線や時間さえも超越する愛の形です。死者との再会を渇望する孤独な魂の彷徨は、私たちが何を「真実」と信じ、何に救いを見出すのかを鋭く問い直させます。残酷な運命に抗う人間の尊厳を浮き彫りにした本作は、ミステリーと歴史、そして純愛が濃密に溶け合う、ピコー文学の真骨頂といえる傑作です。