This time around, though, one wonders if the author herself has found cold winds blowing in her direction. Nineteen Minutes is centred around a high school massacre not dissimilar to the Virginia Tech shooting, which occurred four days after the book was released and in the middle of her publicity tour.

Peter Houghton, the main character and shooter in her book, suffered years of extreme bullying and exclusion in school.

Has she had a hard time for making him a sympathetic character?

"No. I will tell you that I don't find Peter sympathetic. My readers tend to but I do not. Because the first thing he says to me is, 'How many did I kill?' So you don't really feel sympathy for Peter. But you do feel sympathy for what led him to that moment.

I don't think anyone would condone what he does. It's my fervent belief that when the victim picks up the gun he becomes the biggest bully of all. And it's just as simple as that. You do not in any way say that violence is the answer."

Picoult did serious amounts of research before embarking on this novel. She interviewed the police department who handled the Columbine shootings and spent a good deal of time talking with high school witnesses and victims of shootings over the past decade. She goes on to explain that high school shootings actually tend to have very different motivators than college shootings, "college shootings are often motivated by a spurned love affair, or revenge for a grade. I think there were some elements of that in Virginia. In addition, there are certain behaviours for the shooter that I've heard about, at Virginia Tech, that I think are different from my book. I think it's pretty clear that Cho had psychiatric problems; he was going to be committed by a judge. In addition he had two prior arrests and had a very violent history.

What I mean by that is that although you won't find someone like Cho at every school in America, you will find someone like Peter at every school."

Peter is a sweet boy. He hangs out with his best friend Josie until they reach their teenage years and she drifts off to join the popular group, watching silently while Peter tumbles further down the rigid pecking order of High School.

Her interest in these intense bullying dynamics may have begun with her own school career. Picoult had three fingers broken in a locker by a bully when at school and claims her three children, aged 11, 13 and 15, have all struggled with bullying in school.

This background drove her to examine in depth what happens when a person is pushed to the very edge, the same sort of situation that drove 15 year old Jason McLaghlin to walk into Roccori High School, Minnesota and gun down classmates Seth Bartell and Aaron Rollins on 24 September 2003. A boy called Kevin, whom Picoult interviewed and partly based the character of Josie on, was best friends with Bartell and was in gym class with Rollins directly before he was shot outside the locker room.

"On the day of the shooting he (Kevin) was changing next to Aaron in the locker room and Aaron finished a few seconds faster and went upstairs. All of a sudden he heard books dropping, what he thought were books dropping, but then he heard the teacher say, 'Get down, get down.

Aaron's been shot.' Everyone ran out of the locker room and saw Aaron lying in a pool of blood.

They then shovelled the kids into the girls' locker room and kept them there from 11 to 5 not knowing what was going on until the police came and moved them to the library to interview them as witnesses. It was only in the library that he got in line and learned that his best friend had died too."

Having immersed herself in several of the far too frequent school shootings over the past few years, what passed through her head when she heard about Virginia Tech?

"My first thought was oh no . . .

those poor families. The second thought was well, you knew it was going to happen."

You did?

"Oh yeah. I could have told you before this. I was doing press in the US for six weeks saying this will happen again."

Most will have seen and heard a lot about Virginia Tech shooter, Cho Seung-Hui, in the aftermath of his killing spree, not least due to his own remarkable self promotion by putting together a tape of himself and his guns and his angst and anger and posting it to NBC who duly aired it after he had killed 33 students and teachers and then himself. In general, Picoult isn't too impressed with the way the media handle these incidents. She suggests that there is too much focus on the shooter, "Often what the media will do is, immediately in the wake of the shootings, create a sense that the shooter is different from us. It's not going to happen again because he's not like us.

He's a wack-job. And sometimes that's true, but on the other hand very often the profile of a school shooter fits the profile of a normal adolescent at any moment."

"We shouldn't have these repeated shows about the mind of a killer . . . how to get inside Cho.

What if instead the media every day, after reporting the initial facts of the event, celebrated the life of the victim? The next time a kid thinks, I'm going out in a blaze of glory. I'm gonna get my 15 minutes of fame, he's not going to remember those 15 minutes of fame, he's going to remember the victims getting the fame. That might change things a little."

Isn't it a bit too convenient to just chalk it up to a fault in society, though? In Nineteen Minutes one sub character lives for the whole winter off what he can shoot in the woods. Also, Peter's father is a keen hunter who keeps guns in the house and taught Peter how to shoot when he was 12. Although Peter does take two of his father's guns into the school the weapons he uses to kill his classmates (including some he didn't even know) are stolen hand guns from a retired cop who lives down the road. In engineering her story this way is Picoult defending America's gun laws?

"I'm not telling you anything, I'm letting you make that decision. Ultimately, my own personal feeling is that, yes, we should have better gun control. I don't think anybody needs to carry a semi-automatic weapon. Even our minimal gun control laws are not working. There's no way Cho, with two arrests and a conviction from a judge to be put into a psychiatric institution, should ever have been able to buy a gun. So the question is, how did that happen? So that's disturbing enough.

But I would argue, it's not gun control, because look at a place like Australia. People can own guns in Australia. They don't have school shootings. Why?

We're looking at the wrong thing.

It's not the gun that makes the kid kill. It's not access to the gun.

Most psychiatrists who study this will tell you that if someone wants to commit massive school violence they'll find a weapon.

Whether it's hard to find, like the UK, or easy to find, like the US.

You could make a pipe bomb with materials in your garage, and 10 minutes on the Internet, and still kill as many people as he did."

But the fact of the matter is that doesn't happen in the UK, or in Ireland or anywhere else where guns are harder to get hold of. Picoult sticks her heels in, simply saying that the reason we don't have mass school killings is not to do with harder access to guns.

It's true that victims of severe bullying here tend to turn in only on themselves, adding to our high suicide rate. America is founded on the principles of aggressive competition, winners and losers, making yourself into something better, or at least famous, if you aren't doing well in life.

Anyone who has been to school pretty much anywhere in the world will recognise at least some of these pressures but perhaps what makes America so strong and successful can also lead to social catastrophes.

As a massively successful writer (she has written 14 novels, many of them bestsellers, her latest is Number 1 on the New York Times bestseller list and she studied at both Harvard and Princeton), Picoult's success is probably not just a product of the States but her ability to turn her personal experiences into gripping reading. Certainly, as the mother of three children, she is aware that most of her books read like horror stories for parents. In her books sweet children have a nasty habit of growing into sullen, retracted and unknowable teenagers who must find their own way out of their predicaments. Her other main character in Nineteen Minutes, Josie, endures a controlling relationship with popular boy Matt in order to fit in with the in crowd.

He gets her pregnant in a situation that couldn't quite be defined as rape (she didn't say no) but at the same time she didn't really feel able to, in case she faced expulsion from his protective love and their group of friends.

"Josie is definitely in an emotionally abusive relationship, we can say that. According to research, one out of three girls in America is. When I've been in schools, I'll ask the girls only, if you've ever done something with a guy you wish you hadn't raise your hand. And every hand goes up. There's a sense, not just of wanting to fit in with the right crowd and your friends but to be loved and to sacrifice anything for that."

She confesses that having children sharpened her focus on everything, particularly the complicated dynamic between parents and children as they get older. She is a firm believer in listening to the children, citing them as the answer to finding a solution to school bullying.

"Bullying today has become divorced completely from responsibility. You set up a web page where you can post comments about how much you hate a bunch of girls. Or send nasty text messages to someone's phone; you're not facing the victim. If you give kids the onus of responsibility and you say, what can we do to fix this, and say they are personally responsible. It's making them see that your behaviour, or lack of behaviour, has a reaction. One kid said it best in one of the schools I went to. Maybe, he said, it's as simple as this: the next time you see someone doing something you know they shouldn't you say, hey, stop. And everyone laughed, but I said, you know what, that actually would work and I'll tell you why. Behaviour doesn't occur in a vacuum. Because if you do it this time, next time your buddy might do it. And because that victim for the first time in his life might feel that someone stood up for him you might have averted a school shooting of the future without ever knowing it.

High School Shootings Facts

There have been 41 serious High School shooting incidents since Columbine and 46 in the past 10 years including:

>> Tacoma, Washington, 3 January 2007. An 18-year-old male highschool student was arrested for shooting and killing a 17-year-old male student at their school. The suspect allegedly shot the victim in the face and then stood over him, firing twice more.

>> Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, 17 September 2006. Five University basketball players were wounded after a shooting on campus following a dance. One of the two shooters was allegedly upset that his date had talked to one of the athletes.

>> Hillsborough, North Carolina, 30 August 2006. After shooting his father to death, a student opened fire at his high school, injuring two students. Deputies found guns, ammunition and homemade pipe bombs in the student's car. The student had emailed Columbine High's principal telling him that it was "time the world remembered" the shootings at Columbine.

>> Ennis, Texas, 16 May 2001. A 16year-old sophomore, upset over his relationship with a girl, took 17 hostages in English class and shot and killed himself and the girl.

>> Mount Morris Township, Michigan, 29 February 2000. A six-year-old boy shot and killed a six-year-old girl at Buell Elementary School with a .32 caliber handgun.

RECENT HIGH SCHOOL SHOOTINGS WORLDWIDE 113 September 2006 Montreal, Canada. Kimveer Gill (25) opened fire with a semi-automatic weapon at Dawson College.

Anastasia De Sousa (18) died and more than a dozen students and faculty staff were wounded before Gill killed himself.

228 September 2004 Carmen de Patagones, Argentina.

Three students were killed and six wounded by a 15-year-old Argentinian student in a town 620 miles south of Buenos Aires.

228 April, 2002 Vlasenica, Bosnia-Herzegovina. One teacher was killed and another wounded by Dragoslav Petkovic (17) who then killed himself.

226 April, 2002 Erfurt, Germany. Thirteen teachers, two students and one policeman were killed and 10 others wounded by Robert Steinhaeuser (19) at the Johann Gutenberg secondary school.

Steinhaeuser then killed himself.

MMarch 2000 Brandenburg, Germany. One teacher was killed by a 15-year-old student who then shot himself. The shooter has been in a coma ever since.

113 March, 1996 Dunblane, Scotland.

Sixteen children and one teacher were killed at Dunblane Primary School by Thomas Hamilton, who then killed himself. Ten others were wounded in the attack.