John Irving

"In Aspen, Colorado, in 1941, Rachel Brewster is a slalom skier at the National Downhill and Slalom Championships. Little Ray, as she is called, finishes nowhere near the podium, but she manages to get pregnant. Back home, in New England, Little Ray becomes a ski instructor. Her son, Adam, grows up in a family that defies conventions and evades questions concerning the eventful past. Years later, looking for answers, Adam will go to Aspen. In the...

In the summer of 1953, two 11-year-old boys - best friends - are playing in a Little League baseball game in New Hampshire. One of the boys hits a foul ball that kills his best friend's mother. Owen Meany believes he didn't hit the ball by accident. He believes he is God's instrument. What happens to Owen after 1953 is extraordinary and terrifying. He is Irving's most heartbreaking hero.

A girl discovers her mother in bed with a teenage boy and later the mother abandons her. Meanwhile, her father is seducing young girls. So begins the story of Ruth Cole, a famous writer struggling to overcome childhood traumas and find love.

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. A tale that...

The Fourth Hand asks an interesting question: “How can anyone identify a dream of the future?” The answer: “Destiny is not imaginable, except in dreams or to those in love.”
While reporting a story from India, a New York television journalist has his left hand eaten by a lion; millions of TV viewers witness the accident. In Boston, a renowned hand surgeon awaits the opportunity to perform the nation’s...

A Hindi film star, an American missionary, a pair of twins separated at birth, a diminutive chauffeur, and a serial killer collide in a riotous novel by the author of The World According to Garp
“His most entertaining novel since Garp.”—The New York Times Book Review

“A Son of the Circus is comic genius . . . get ready for [John] Irving's most raucous novel to date.”—The...

The Hotel New Hampshire follows the Berry family across two continents and through three hotels. Family members attract friends who substitute lust, violence, laughter and tears for the standard bourgeois components.

Tells a compelling and heartwarming story about how far a young man must travel to find the place where he truly belongs. Homer has lived nearly his entire life within the walls of an orphanage in rural Maine and has been groomed by its proprietor to be his successor. But Homer falls in love and strikes out on his own.

T. S. Garp is a sweet-natured writer whose life is a weird minefield of violence, adultery, fatherhood, feminism, and eerie coincidences.