Lone Wolf ...by Jodi Picoult

A father goes into a a vegetative state after an accident. Leaves behind a daughter who will turn 18 in 3 months and a son who ran off to Thailand 6 years before. Has an ex-wife but she's happily married to a lawyer and they have a set of twins.

Mother summons the son, Edward, home because there was no next of kin to decide as daughter, Cara is not yet the legal age to make decisions. Edward wants to end life support while Cara wants it continue, because she hopes that her father will miraculously recover even though doctors say it is improbable due to his extensive injuries.

Luke Warren was a wolf man, an wolf conservationist, a man who studies wolf. He went to the extent of getting accepted into the hierarchy of the wolf pack, living and eating with them. And the novel is interspersed with tales of the wolf packs, how they live and function to survive.

This is a novel about choices. Medical science can often prolonged life when life would have actually ceased. And it has made moral choices very difficult. The animal kingdom is a practical one... survival not enabled by all these modern trappings. And Picoult weaves the tales of the two worlds in the novel, navigating between those choices in the wolf pack and the drama in the human world. The latter is also world of secrets, tragedy. The former is about plain survival. Sometimes I think our world would be easier if we operate like the wolf pack.

It's an interesting book, one which reminds me that very often life can be simpler and easier but made cloudy by us because of vested interests and other reasons. And perhaps too why man is different from animals...

This book took a long time to finish.... 19th book this year.