The 58-year-old bestselling author Jodi Picoult has dealt with many big issues in her three-decade career. In her 29 books to date, she has dealt with racism, the death penalty, abortion and school shootings. Now she is turning her attention to another big question: What if Shakespeare’s plays had actually been written by someone else – and what if that someone had been a woman?

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Her latest novel Under a different nameout August 20, tells the stories on two timelines of Emilia Bassano, a real-life contemporary of the poet who some historians believe may be the author of Shakespeare’s work, and Melina Green, a fictional modern playwright who finds success by using the name of her black male roommate.

Picoult believes that just looking at Shakespeare’s strong, independent female characters makes a reader wonder whether he could (or would) have written them alone, as a self-taught writer, actor and producer at the same time – at a time when women were not even allowed to publish under their own names.

“(He wrote) these women who were so strong and so different from women back then,” she explains. When she read an article in The Atlantic about Shakespeare’s authorship, which revealed that he had never taught his two daughters to read, alarm bells rang for Picoult.

“That’s nonsense,” she exclaims. “I don’t think the man who created these characters wouldn’t have taught his own daughters to read and write.”

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Beyond the question of female authorship, Picoult was prompted to incorporate the modern element by some of her own experiences in adapting Between the lines, the book she wrote with her daughter Samantha van Leer, for the stage – not to mention life as a woman in today’s world, period.

“I wanted to talk about how little has changed in 400 years,” she says. “We are literally at a crossroads in this country right now where women are being stripped of their rights. And where women’s voices are again not being counted. I would argue that I have written perhaps the most timely, real story I have ever written. This is happening in real time. This is not historical.”

The author added that everything that was said to Melina, the fictional playwright, was said to her “to her face” and that she doesn’t understand why stories about women written by women aren’t more common. “But that also raises the whole question of what diversity in creativity in the theater means, and that’s something Emilia (Bassano) has had to grapple with as well.”

Their urge to point out inequality is another reason Under a different name is so important to them.

“I got into a lot of trouble talking about gender discrimination in publishing and in the arts, and in many ways it all fed into this particular book and this particular story,” she explains. “You have to raise the table. You make sure there are stories for black writers and queer writers and brown writers and women writers and all of those things, and that’s not happening yet.”

Under a different name will be published on August 20th by Ballantine Books and can be pre-ordered now wherever the book is sold.