CONCORD – A best-selling author’s novel about a school shooting has rattled nerves in her hometown of Hanover, where high school officials pulled it from the reading list amid fears the fictional town too closely resembles the real thing.

Jodi Picoult’s “Nineteen Minutes” won’t even be published until March 6. Students at Hanover High School were among three schools in New Hampshire and Massachusetts given advance copies to study. In the novel, an ostracized teen living in Sterling, N.H. – a wealthy, Upper Valley college town on the Vermont border – goes on a school shooting rampage, killing 10 people in 19 minutes.

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Picoult said in one class, “Nineteen Minutes” was being taught alongside James Dickey’s “Deliverance,” which depicts sodomy and violence, Vladimir Nabokov’s child-sex novel “Lolita,” and Anthony Burgess’ violent “The Clockwork Orange.”

“I don’t know really what makes ‘Lolita’ any less disturbing than ‘Nineteen Minutes,’ ” she said.