A tragic-comic classic from one of the world's greatest living writers.
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.
John Irving has been compared to Kurt Vonnegut and J.D. Salinger,
but is arguably more inventive than either. Wry, laconic, he
sketches his characters with an economy that springs from a feeling
for words and a mastery of his craft
*The Times*
Irving writes with a lapidary directness that is unsurpassed by any
living writer
*Sunday Telegraph*
It is very satisfying to read a book that is hard to put down, and
if this were a more valued criterion, Irving would no doubt by now
have received the official accolades he deserves
*Financial Times*
Vivid, eccentric, memorable
*Independent*
Irving's popularity is not too difficult to understand. His world
really is the world according to everyone
*Time*
Actor Jack Burns seeks a sense of identity and father figures while accommodating a host of overbearing and elaborately dysfunctional women in Irving's latest sprawling novel (after The Fourth Hand). At the novel's onset (in 1969), four-year-old Jack is dragged by his mother, Alice, a Toronto-based tattoo artist, on a year-long search throughout northern Europe for William Burns, Jack's runaway father, a church organist and "ink addict." Back in Toronto, Alice enrolls Jack at the all-girls school St. Hilda's, where she mistakenly thinks he'll be "safe among the girls"; he later transfers to Redding, an all-boy's prep school in Maine. Jack survives a childhood remarkable for its relentless onslaught of sexual molestation at the hands of older girls and women to become a world-famous actor and Academy Award-winning screenwriter. Eventually, he retraces his childhood steps across Europe, in search of the truth about his father-a quest that also emerges as a journey toward normalcy. Though the incessant, graphic sexual abuse becomes gratuitous, Irving handles the novel's less seedy elements superbly: the earthy camaraderie of the tattoo parlors, the Hollywood glitz, Jack's developing emotional authenticity, his discovery of a half-sister and a moving reunion with his father. Agent, Janet Turnbull Irving. (July) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.
John Irving has been compared to Kurt Vonnegut and J.D. Salinger,
but is arguably more inventive than either. Wry, laconic, he
sketches his characters with an economy that springs from a feeling
for words and a mastery of his craft * The Times *
Irving writes with a lapidary directness that is unsurpassed by any
living writer * Sunday Telegraph *
It is very satisfying to read a book that is hard to put down, and
if this were a more valued criterion, Irving would no doubt by now
have received the official accolades he deserves * Financial Times
*
Vivid, eccentric, memorable * Independent *
Irving's popularity is not too difficult to understand. His world
really is the world according to everyone * Time *
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