T. S. Garp, a man with high ambitions for an artistic career and with obsessive devotion to his wife and children, and Jenny Fields, his famous feminist mother, find their lives surrounded by an assortment of people including teachers, whores, and radical
The Cider House Rules is filled with people to love and to feel for. . . . The characters in John Irvings novel break all the rules, and yet they remain noble and free-spirited.-- The Houston Post First published in 1985, The Cider House Rules is set in rural Maine in the first half of the twentieth century. The novel tells the story of Dr. Wilbur Larch--saint and obstetrician, founder and director of the orphanage in the town of St. Clouds, ether addict and abortionist. This is also the story of Dr. Larchs favorite orphan, Homer Wells, who is never adopted. Praise for The Cider House Rules [Irving] is among the very best storytellers at work today. At the base of Irvings own moral concerns is a rare and lasting regard for human kindness. -- The Philadelphia Inquirer Superb in scope and originality, a novel as good as one could hope to find from any author, anywhere, anytime. Engrossing, moving, thoroughly satisfying. --Joseph Heller An old-fashioned, big-hearted novel . . . with its epic yearning caught in the nineteenth century, somewhere between Trollope and Twain. -- Boston Sunday Globe
While playing baseball in the summer of 1953, Owen Meany hits a foul ball that kills his best friend's mother, and he becomes convinced that he is an instrument of God
In 1954, in the cookhouse of a logging and sawmill settlement in northern New Hampshire, an anxious twelve-year-old boy mistakes the local constable's girlfriend for a bear. Both the twelve-year-old and his father become fugitives, forced to run from Coos County-to Boston, to southern Vermont, to Toronto-pursued by the implacable constable. Their lone protector is a fiercely libertarian logger, once a river driver, who befriends them. In a story spanning five decades, Last Night in Twisted River -John Irving's twelfth novel-depicts the recent half-century in the United States as "a living replica of Coos County, where lethal hatreds were generally permitted to run their course." From the novel's taut opening sentence-"The young Canadian, who could not have been more than fifteen, had hesitated too long"-to its elegiac final chapter, Last Night in Twisted River is written with the historical authenticity and emotional authority of The Cider House Rules and A Prayer for Owen Meany . It is also as violent and disturbing a story as John Irving's breakthrough bestseller, The World According to Garp. What further distinguishes Last Night in Twisted River is the author's unmistakable voice-the inimitable voice of an accomplished storyteller. Near the end of this moving novel, John Irving writes: "We don't always have a choice how we get to know one another. Sometimes, people fall into our lives cleanly-as if out of the sky, or as if there were a direct flight from Heaven to Earth-the same sudden way we lose people, who once seemed they would always be part of our lives."
John Irving, it is abundantly clear, is a true artist.-- Los Angeles Times Fred "Bogus" Trumper has troubles. A divorced, broke graduate student of Old Norse in 1970s New York, Trumper is a wayward knight-errant in the battle of the sexes and the pursuit of happiness: His ex-wife has moved in with his childhood best friend, his life is the subject of a tell-all movie, and his chronic urinary tract infection requires surgery. Trumper is determined to change. There's only one problem: it seems the harder he tries to alter his adolescent ways, the more he is drawn to repeating the mistakes of the past. . . . Written when Irving was twenty-nine, Trumper's tale of woe is told with all the wit and humor that would become Irving's trademark. Three or four times as funny as most novels. -- The New Yorker Praise for The Water-Method Man Friendship, marriage, and family are his primary themes, but at that blundering level of life where mishap and folly--something close to joyful malice--perpetually intrude and distrupt, often fatally. Life, in [John] Irving's fiction, is always under siege. Harm and disarray are daily fare, as if the course of love could not run true. . . . Irving's multiple manner . . . his will to come at the world from different directions, is one of the outstandint traits of The World According to Garp, but this remarkable flair for . . . stories inside stories . . . isalready handled with mastery . . . and with a freedom almost wanton in The Water-Method Man [which is Garp's predecessor by six years]. --Terrence Des Pres Brutal reality and hallucination, comedy and pathos. A rich, unified tapestry. -- Time
When a New York journalist suffers a horrible accident--his left hand eaten by a lion while reporting on a story from India--witnessed by millions on television, viewers rally to help him.
Grasping for a self identity after a life spent on the move, fifty-nine-year-old Dr. Farrokh Daruwalla visits India, where he meets a variety of colorful circus characters, including dwarf clowns, transvestites, and movie stars. Reprint.
In A Widow for One Year , we follow Ruth Cole through three of the most pivotal times in her life: from her girlhood on Long Island (in the summer of 1958) through the fall of 1990 (when she is an unmarried woman whose personal life is not nearly as successful as her literary career), and at last in the autumn of 1995, when Ruth is a forty-one-year-old widow and mother (and shes about to fall in love for the first time). Both elegiac and erotic, A Widow for One Year is a multilayered love story of astonishing emotional force.
The author of The World According to Garp and Hotel New Hampshire offers a candid portrayal of his thirteen-year effort to turn Cider House Rules into a successful film, and offers a behind-the-scenes look at the filmmaking process.
Chronicles the life of a complex, abrasive woman born in the shadow of her siblings' deaths and her parents' adultery, who only finds love after motherhood and widowhood.
