LoveReading Says
LoveReading Says
June 2014 Guest Editor Freya North on A Widow for One Year...
This is a stunning novel by one of my favourite authors. Typical Irving, it’s the perfect blend of drama and bawdiness beautifully told. His heroine, Ruth Cole, is an author and her story is told through three sections – her childhood and the loss of her two brothers; when she is unmarried and forging her writing career; finally, when she has become a widow at the age of 41. There was so much of her personality – especially her process as an author – that rang true with me. Irving’s attention to detail is incredible – I ‘saw’ everything he wanted me to but nothing was description just for the sake of it. The last sentence is stunning in bringing this lengthy and complex story full circle – so moving and satisfying. Dare I say I preferred it to Owen Meany?
LoveReading
Find This Book In
About
A Widow for One Year Synopsis
"A Widow For One Year will appeal to readers who like old-fashioned storytelling mixed with modern sensitivities. . . . Irving is among the few novelists who can write a novel about grief and fill it with ribald humor soaked in irony."-USA Today
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 she's about to fall in love for the first time). Both elegiac and sensual, A Widow for One Year is a multilayered love story of astonishing emotional force.
Praise for A Widow for One Year
"Compelling . . . By turns antic and moving, lusty and tragic, A Widow for One Year is bursting with memorable moments. . . . A testament to one of life's most difficult lessons: In the end, you just have to find a way to keep going."-San Francisco Examiner-Chronicle
"A sprawling 19th-century production, chock full of bizarre coincidences, multiple plot lines, lengthy digressions, and stories within stories. . . . An engaging and often affecting fable, a fairy tale that manages to be old-fashioned and modern all at once."-The New York Times
"[Irving's] characters can beguile us onto thin ice and persuade us to dance there. His instinctive mark is the moral choice stripped bare, and his aim is impressive. What's more, there's hardly a writer alive who can match his control of the omniscient point of view."-The Washington Post Book World
"In the sprawling, deeply felt A Widow for One Year, John Irving has delivered his best novel since The World According to Garp. . . . Like a warm bath, it's a great pleasure to immerse yourself in."-Entertainment Weekly
"John Irving is arguably the American Balzac, or perhaps our Dickens-a rip-roaring storyteller whose intricate plot machinery is propelled by good old-fashioned greed, foolishness and passion."-The Nation
"Powerful . . . a masterpiece."-St. Louis Post-Dispatch
About This Edition
| ISBN: |
9780345424716 |
| Publication date: |
23rd March 1999 |
| Author: |
John Irving |
| Publisher: |
Ballantine an imprint of Random House Publishing Group |
| Format: |
Paperback |
| Pagination: |
560 pages |
| Primary Genre |
Modern and Contemporary Fiction
|
| Recommendations: |
|
Press Reviews
John Irving Press Reviews
'Wickedly knowing, mischievously post-modern and magical realist along the lines of Gunter Grass, Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Robertson Davies' Time Out
'Gripping, full of horror and humour' Literary Review
'A compelling chronicle of love and loss... His most intricate and fully imagined novel' San Francisco Chronicle
'Irving's storytelling has never been better' New York Times
'His best since Garp' Time
'Very few novels have ever made me cry. Irving's The World According to Garp was one. Now, 20 years later, he scores again on my emotional map. Widow is a book to reassure: Dickensian in scope, hilarious on one page, heartbreaking just a few pages later, sexy all the way through, it winds its way through the lives of its oh-so-fallible characters like a devious serpent, slow, languorous in its rhythm, ever ready to bite ferociously at the first opportunity. It's about characters who are all somehow writers (and one brave, lone Dutch policeman), about motherhood, love lost, regained and never forgotten, loyalty and betrayal, the intransigent demands of the heart and the soul. In one word, it's about life. And all its damning contradictions. Like all the best novels, it will stay with you for a long time, seeding your mind with questions and truly unforgettable images, every description a joy or a heartbreak.' (Kirkus UK)
Author
About John Irving
John Irving was born in Exeter, New Hampshire, in 1942, and he once admitted that he was a 'grim' child. Although he excelled in English at school and knew by the time he graduated that he wanted to write novels, it was not until he met a young Southern novelist named John Yount, at the University of New Hampshire, that he received encouragement. 'It was so simple,' he remembers. 'Yount was the first person to point out that anything I did except writing was going to be vaguely unsatisfying.'
In 1963, Irving enrolled at the Institute of European Studies in Vienna, and he later worked as a university lecturer. His first novel, Setting Free the Bears, about a plot to release all the animals from the Vienna Zoo, was followed by The Water-Method Man, a comic tale of a man with a urinary complaint, and The 158-Pound Marriage, which exposes the complications of spouse-swapping. Irving achieved international recognition with The World According to Garp, which he hoped would 'cause a few smiles among the tough-minded and break a few softer hearts'.
The Hotel New Hampshire is a startlingly original family saga, and The Cider House Rules is the story of Doctor Wilbur Larch - saint, obstetrician, founder of an orphanage, ether addict and abortionist - and of his favourite orphan, Homer Wells, who is never adopted. A Prayer for Owen Meany features the most unforgettable character Irving has yet created. A Son of the Circus is an extraordinary evocation of modern day India. John Irving's latest and most ambitious novel is A Widow for One Year.
A collection of John Irving’s shorter writing, Trying to Save Piggy Sneed, was published in 1993. Irving has also written the screenplays for The Cider House Rules and A Son of the Circus, and wrote about his experiences in the world of movies in his memoir My Movie Business.
Irving has had a life-long passion for wrestling, and he plays a wrestling referee in the film of The World According to Garp. In his memoir, The Imaginary Girlfriend, John Irving writes about his life as a wrestler, a novelist and as a wrestling coach. He now writes full-time, has three children and lives in Vermont and Toronto.
More About John Irving
