My Sister's Keeper is this month's Oxford -Waterstones Book of The Month.

BE WARNED – Jodi Picoult novels are not for the faint-hearted. Maybe I’m a lily-livered bloke, but I found the plot of Picoult’s latest blockbuster particularly harrowing.

When I first started the novel, I found myself shocked by the main premise. Wasn’t the author exploiting the less fortunate in society by focusing so sharply on their troubled lives?

If Picoult’s stories are based on real-life scenarios and ethical dilemmas then is it right for the author to sell them as entertainment for the masses?

But as I became more absorbed in the family’s ordeal, I realised that the writer was telling her story with a great deal of empathy for her characters’ sufferings - partly because she has experienced some of the same traumas herself.

In My Sister’s Keeper, now a major film starring Cameron Diaz, pictured, and Abigail Breslin, mum Sara Fitzgerald has a terrible decision to make.

Her daughter Kate is two years old when she is diagnosed with a rare form of leukaemia.

The test results are disappointing, because they show that no-one in the family is a match for Kate.

If they are to find a donor for the crucial bone marrow transplant, there is only one option – creating another baby, specially designed to save her sister.

For Sara, it seems the ideal solution, until aged 13, sister Anna decides that she doesn’t want to help Kate live any more. Picoult has drawn on her own experience to write such harrowing tales, and it is perhaps not surprising that horror specialist Stephen King is a big fan.

When her middle son Jake was five he was diagnosed with tumours in his ears which could burrow into his brain and kill him.

He underwent surgery 10 times and is now perfectly healthy.

Picoult recalls: “Every time I walked beside his gurney, I’d think ‘OK, just take my ear, if that keeps him from going through this again’.

“That utter desperation and desire to make him healthy again became the heart of Sara’s monologues – and is the reason that I cannot hate her for making the decisions she did.”

My Sister’s Keeper was the first of Picoult’s novels that one of her own children has read and it provoked a strong reaction.

The author recalls how her son Kyle, 12, was visibly shaken by the story, adding: “The day he finished the book, I found him weeping on the couch.

“He pushed me away and went up to his room and told me that he didn’t really want to see me or talk to me for a while - he was that upset.

“Eventually, when we did sit down to discuss it, he kept asking ‘Why? Why did it have to end like that?’”

My Sister’s Keeper is never going to be an easy read for the beach or any other destination, but it is a gripping story.

The subject matter challenges the reader to confront complex moral dilemmas head-on, and although Picoult would not be my first choice for a bedtime story, I don’t doubt the author’s genuine intention to comfort and inform readers.