New York ? A.M. Homes doesn’t court controversy. But it finds her nonetheless.

She published her first work at age 19, a play called the “Call-in Hours,” and was promptly threatened with a lawsuit over it by the reclusive writer J.D. Salinger for including both Holden Caulfield and Salinger himself.

“He threatened to sue, to shut down the production of it,” she said. “It was sort of terrifying. He was one of my heroes.”

Salinger didn’t sue, but she eliminated Caulfield and the author’s name from the play, and the show went on for about six weeks near her home in Chevy Chase, Md.

“That was the beginning, my welcome to the literary world,” she said. And she was off, quickly becoming known for her explosive, often disturbing stories.

“It’s all out there floating around,” Homes said. “I just organize it. It’s not about liking the characters. I care for them, but it’s not my job to create people that are likable.”

Homes, now in her mid-40s, is again causing a stir with her latest work, “This Book Will Save Your Life.” Such a title by any other writer would mean the reader was in for sweet inspiration. But with Homes, chances seem slim. The title must be a trick. This is the same woman who showed readers the deranged mind of a pedophile in “The End of Alice.”

But while the characters in “This Book” are flawed and often bizarre, there’s nary a trace of the perverse.

In fact, the book is downright uplifting.

Early start

Homes says it comes from the same observations that fuel her other novels. She’s always been an observer, she said, often on the sidelines because she was shy. Homes used writing as a way to reach people. “On the other hand, you’re still sort of protected in your bubble,” she said of writing. “It just felt safer.”

One can imagine Homes as the young girl Amy, with long dark hair, sitting up in her room at a desk, scribbling away for much of the afternoon. She was a published author at 15, a collection of poems which she now jokingly said she wishes she could have back.

And she had an impressive slew of pen pals, including Pete Townshend and John Sayles. “I used to write to strangers all the time – all kinds of people,” she said. But the letters weren’t your typical rantings from a boy-crazy teenage girl.

“I wasn’t like ‘Oh you were so wonderful,’ it was like, ‘Today at school, Susie was mean to me,”‘ Homes said.

Homes attended the prestigious Iowa Writer’s Workshop and later taught at Columbia while she wrote novels, but stopped to focus on writing full time.

“Every book has its own set of challenges,” she said. “On the one hand, I wanted to do all the things that people think of me as doing, be dark and challenging, but I also tried to take a character so disconnected and have him up and become somebody.”

Truth meets fiction

Homes said she starts with an idea: in this case, money and class and how it changes a person. “I’m interested in our responsibilities to each other. I really wanted to draw people’s attention to this character and his struggle, and that it’s not unique to him. It’s about how to be present in your own life.”

In “This Book,” Richard Novak, a middle-aged wealthy man in Los Angeles, doubles over one day in pain and can’t figure out why. From there, he’s slowly shaped into a hero, mending the broken relationship with his son and literally saving a few lives.

She says she’s a true fiction writer, but she does do loads of research. For this book, she spent time in Los Angeles, writing a nonfiction travel book about the area. As a result, what seems made-up in the book is often true. The characters may be purely fiction, but the feral Chihuahuas and huge sinkholes swallowing up homes are real.

“What is constant in her work is the way she sees the world: It’s captured in her story telling, no matter her subject,” said her Viking editor, Paul Slovak.

Her first novel, “Jack,” published when she was 19, is the story of a teenage boy whose father admits to being a homosexual after his parents divorce. She created a crack-smoking yuppie couple who burn down their house in “Music for Torching,” and wrote a short story about a boy who rapes a Barbie doll in her collection “The Safety of Objects.”

Slovak says she’s always on the pulse of the moment. “Even in editing there were things happening in the world that were already written down in her novel,” he said. “I mean, Columbine happened three weeks after ‘Music for Torching’ came out.”