The inaugural Library Beat webinar focuses on adult fiction and includes an exclusive prerecorded video interview with No. 1 New York Times bestselling author Jodi Picoult. Picoult is the author of 30 novels, including The Pact, My Sister’s Keeper, The Storyteller, and Great Small Things.

Picoult’s new novel, out Sept. 15 from Ballantine, is Hollow Bones. It features Molly Ambrose, the young prodigy who runs Rhode Island’s emergency preparedness and response program; when Molly was just an infant lost her own mother in the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center. The novel also brings back a character that fans will remember from My Sister’s Keeper: Jesse Fitzgerald, now a detective on the Providence police force and Molly’s husband.

“Picoult supplies her signature delightful banter and gift for depicting passion and romance to win the reader’s sympathy for this possibly questionable match between dedicated public servants,” Kirkus writes in a starred review. “The queen of social activist novels has done it again. Impressive, important, and fun to read.”

Picoult joined us from her home office in New Hampshire, where, with her usual sparkle and wit, she discussed libraries and how a PostSecret post inspired Hollow Bones. The author is a longtime advocate for libraries and critic of censorship in schools; her 2007 novel about a school shooting, Nineteen Minutes, is one of the most frequently banned or challenged books in the United States. To the librarians on the front lines during this time of surging book bans across the country, Picoult shared a direct message: “I want them to know that we authors who are being banned see them and thank them.”

Library correspondent Silvia Lin Hanick is chairperson of the library department at LaGuardia Community College (CUNY) in New York.