The Cider House Rules (95 page)

—New York Newsday

“
A Son of the Circus
is comic genius. . . . Get ready for Irving’s most raucous novel to date.”

—Boston Globe

THE IMAGINARY GIRLFRIEND

The Imaginary Girlfriend
is a candid memoir of the writers and wrestlers who played a role in John Irving’s development as a novelist and as a wrestler. It also portrays a father’s dedication—Irving coached his two sons to championship titles. It is an illuminating, concise work, a literary treasure.

“The nearest thing to an autobiography Irving has written. . . . Worth saving and savoring.”

—Seattle Times

A WIDOW FOR ONE YEAR

Twenty years after
The World According to Garp
, John Irving gave us his ninth novel,
A Widow for One Year
, about a family marked by tragedy. Ruth Cole is a complex, often self-contradictory character—a “difficult” woman. By no means is she conventionally “nice,” but she will never be forgotten. Ruth’s story is told in three parts, each focusing on a critical time in her life. When we first meet her—on Long Island, in the summer of 1958—Ruth is only four. The second window into Ruth’s life opens on the fall of 1990, when she is an unmarried woman whose personal life is not nearly as successful as her literary career. She distrusts her judgment in men, for good reason.
A Widow for One Year
closes in the autumn of 1995, when Ruth Cole is a forty-one-year-old widow and mother. She’s about to fall in love for the first time. Richly comic, as well as deeply disturbing,
A Widow for One Year
is a multilayered love story of astonishing emotional force. Both ribald and erotic, it is also a brilliant novel about the passage of time and the relentlessness of grief.

“By turns antic and moving, lusty and tragic,
A Widow for One Year
is bursting with memorable moments.”

—San Francisco Examiner-Chronicle

MY MOVIE BUSINESS

After two producers, four directors, thirteen years, and uncounted rewrites, the movie version of John Irving’s acclaimed novel
The Cider House Rules
at last made it to the big screen. Here is the author’s account of the novel-to-film process. Anecdotal, affectionate, and delightfully candid,
My Movie Business
dazzles with Irving’s incomparable wit and style.

“Writing a novel is like swimming in the sea; writing a film is like swimming in the bath. . . . This short, amiable book is John Irving’s personal history of seeing—or not seeing—his novels made into movies. . . . The book digresses charmingly and effortlessly into related subjects. There is a beguiling memoir of his grandfather, an eminent surgeon; a brilliant and passionate argument for the freedom of women to choose abortion . . . observations on the origins of his novels, and so on. . . . Irving remains cooly objective, and it is clear why: he is a novelist, first and foremost, and his attitude toward the movie business is informed by this security and certainty. . . . Irving has done us [writers] proud.”

—New York Times Book Review

THE FOURTH HAND

While reporting a story from India, New York journalist Patrick Wallingford inadvertently becomes his own headline when his left hand is eaten by a lion. In Boston, a renowned surgeon eagerly awaits the opportunity to perform the nation’s first hand transplant. But what if the donor’s widow demands visitation rights with the hand? In answering this unexpected question, John Irving has written a novel that is by turns brilliantly comic and emotionally moving, offering a penetrating look at the power of second chances and the will to change.

“A rich and deeply moving tale. . . . Vintage Irving: a story of two very disparate people, and the strange and unexpected ways we grow.”

—Washington Post Book World

UNTIL I FIND YOU

“According to his mother, Jack Burns was an actor before he was an actor, but Jack’s most vivid memories of childhood were those moments when he felt compelled to hold his mother’s hand. He wasn’t acting then.” So begins John Irving’s eleventh novel,
Until I Find You
, the story of the actor Jack Burns. His mother, Alice, is a Toronto tattoo artist. When Jack is four, he travels with Alice to several Baltic and North Sea ports; they are trying to find Jack’s missing father, William, a church organist who is addicted to being tattooed. But Alice is a mystery, and William can’t be found. Even Jack’s memories are subject to doubt.

Jack Burns is educated at schools in Canada and New England, but he is shaped by his relationships with older women. Mr. Irving renders Jack’s life as an actor in Hollywood with the same richness of detail and range of emotions he uses to describe the tattoo parlors in those Baltic and North Sea ports and the reverberating music Jack heard as a child in European churches.

The author’s tone—indeed, the narrative voice of this novel—is melancholic. (“In this way, in increments both measurable and not, our childhood is stolen from us—not always in one momentous event but often in a series of small robberies, which add up to the same loss.”)
Until I Find You
is suffused with overwhelming sadness and deception; it is also a robust and comic novel, certain to be compared to Mr. Irving’s most ambitious and moving work.

“Bittersweet . . . moving.”

—People

LAST NIGHT IN TWISTED RIVER

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
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.” What further distinguishes
Last Night in Twisted River
is the author’s unmistakable voice—the inimitable voice of an accomplished storyteller.

“Absolutely unmissable. . . . [A] bighearted, brilliantly written and superbly realized intergenerational tale of a father and son.”

—Financial Times

IN ONE PERSON

A compelling novel of desire, secrecy, and sexual identity,
In One Person
is a story of unfulfilled love—tormented, funny, and affecting—and an impassioned embrace of our sexual differences. Billy, the bisexual narrator and main character of
In One Person
, tells the tragicomic story (lasting more than half a century) of his life as a “sexual suspect,” a phrase first used by John Irving in 1978 in his landmark novel of “terminal cases,”
The World According to Garp
.

His most political novel since
The Cider House Rules
and
A Prayer for Owen Meany
, John Irving’s
In One Person
is a poignant tribute to Billy’s friends and lovers—a theatrical cast of characters who defy category and convention. Not least,
In One Person
is an intimate and unforgettable portrait of the solitariness of a bisexual man who is dedicated to making himself “worthwhile.”

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Also by John Irving

Fiction

In One Person

Last Night in Twisted River

Until I Find You

The Fourth Hand

A Widow for One Year

A Son of the Circus

Trying to Save Piggy Sneed

A Prayer for Owen Meany

The Hotel New Hampshire

The World According to Garp

The 158-Pound Marriage

The Water-Method Man

Setting Free the Bears

Nonfiction

My Movie Business

The Imaginary Girlfriend

Screenplays

The Cider House Rules

Copyright

The Cider House Rules
is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

First published in hardcover by William Morrow and Company in 1985.

P.S.™ is a trademark of HarperCollins Publishers.

Excerpt from
A Prayer for Owen Meany
copyright © 1989 by Garp Enterprises, Ltd. The excerpt is taken from the first chapter of the book, which also appeared in
The New Yorker
in slightly different form.

THE CIDER HOUSE RULES
. Copyright © 1985 by Garp Enterprises, Ltd. All rights reserved. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

FIRST EDITION

EPub Edition © AUGUST 2012 ISBN: 9780062235183

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