Promotional Information

A masterpiece from one of the great contemporary American writers.

About the Author

John Irving published his first novel, Setting Free the Bears, in 1968. He has been nominated for a National Book Award three times - winning once, in 1980, for the novel The World According to Garp. He also received an O. Henry Award in 1981 for the short story 'Interior Space'. In 1992, he was inducted into the National Wrestling Hall of Fame in Stillwater, Oklahoma. In 2000, he won the Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay for The Cider House Rules - a film with seven Academy Award nominations. In 2001, he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His most recent novel is Last Night in Twisted River.

Reviews

A rich and deeply moving tale... Vintage Irving
*Washington Post*

A beguiling tale of love and redemption
*Time Out*

Peerless... Writing without a wasted second
*Guardian*

Articulate, clever, quirky, more than a touch profound and very funny
*Mirror*

Sharp and very, very funny, this is another of Irving's fiercely original meditations of life's inherent strangeness
*Uncut*

The author's tenth novel charts events and emotions in the life of a newscaster whose fame skyrockets when his left hand is eaten by a lion on camera. When the "widow" of a transplant hand accompanies the appendage to meet the handsome amputee, the determined woman more or less coerces him into sex and conceives the child she's longed for. What follows is a mostly enjoyable trip, abundant in the quirks and themes familiar to Irving's legion of fans: scatological humor, women's rights activism, the rewarding stress of fatherhood, sports metaphors, circuses, and the chronic normality of eccentricities. Irving's worlds are ludicrous in the most appealing way and expertly sentimental at the same time, and his approachable language can be both musical and magical. But here, the promising fiction takes a sharp right turn to autopsy the real-life tragedies of the JFK Jr. and Egypt Air plane crashes Tom Wolfe-type reportage that we certainly don't look for from Irving. Perhaps more disappointing is that the protagonist is motivated primarily by shockingly unoriginal doubts about and eventual disdain for the news media's morbid coverage of world events. Irving's fiction is often moral in its own way, but the moral has never come so close to obscuring the narrative as in this book. The author's magic rules the day, but recent history plays too large a role here to make this the fiction for which he'll be remembered. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 3/1/01.] Doug McClemont, New York Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

A rich and deeply moving tale... Vintage Irving * Washington Post *
A beguiling tale of love and redemption * Time Out *
Peerless... Writing without a wasted second * Guardian *
Articulate, clever, quirky, more than a touch profound and very funny * Mirror *
Sharp and very, very funny, this is another of Irving's fiercely original meditations of life's inherent strangeness * Uncut *