The Storyteller
Jodi Picoult's The Storyteller, published in 2013, is one of her most morally complicated novels and a sustained meditation on guilt, forgiveness, and what we are owed by the past. Sage Singer is a reclusive baker in a small New Hampshire town, hiding a scarred face and a quiet life lived mostly at night. At a grief support group she meets Josef Weber, a beloved retired teacher in his nineties, and the two strike up an unlikely friendship over chess and shared loneliness. One afternoon Josef asks Sage to help him die. He cannot do it himself, he says, because of what he did seventy years ago. He is, he tells her, a former SS officer who served at one of the death camps, and he believes Sage, the granddaughter of a Holocaust survivor, is uniquely placed to grant him absolution and an ending. Picoult interweaves Sage's story with the testimony of Sage's grandmother Minka, whose own narrative carries the reader into the ghettos and camps of Poland, and with a fairy tale Minka began writing as a young woman. The result is a novel about whether forgiveness is anyone's to give, what survival actually costs, and how stories themselves can be a kind of weapon, or a kind of grace.
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The questions readers send us most often, answered without spoilers.
New Hampshire baker Sage Singer is twenty-five and badly scarred when she meets ninety-five-year-old Josef Weber at a grief group. After months of friendship, Josef asks Sage to help him die, and tells her he was an SS officer at Auschwitz, where her own grandmother Minka survived.
Multiple books share this title. The most-searched is The Storyteller: Tales of Life and Music by Dave Grohl (2021), the Foo Fighters frontman's memoir. Jodi Picoult also has a novel by that title.
Yes. The Storyteller is Dave Grohl's collection of autobiographical essays, covering his time in Nirvana, the founding of Foo Fighters, and his career across decades of rock music.
The Storyteller is 356 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, The Storyteller takes most readers 5 to 8 hours to finish.
The Storyteller is a standalone novel by an unknown author, not part of a series.
The Storyteller is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.