The Tenth Circle

Daniel Stone draws comic books for a living, and his teenage daughter Trixie is the one who keeps him grounded. After a party, Trixie accuses a classmate of rape, and the friends who once stood beside her turn on her instead. Overwhelmed, she leaves for Alaska, and Daniel has to go looking for her while confronting a violent history he has long kept hidden.

Jodi Picoult's novel is an adult book that moves between Trixie's and Daniel's perspectives and draws on the imagery of Dante's Inferno, with its circles of suffering. Its central concerns are loyalty, the pressure of a peer group, the difficulty of believing a survivor, and how a parent deals with the past.

The book suits readers who want emotionally direct family drama that takes on a hard, contested question about sexual assault and its aftermath.