A Widow For One Year by John Irving

Description

Bibliographic Details

• Author: John Irving
• Title: A Widow For One Year
• Publisher: ‎ Random House (May 5, 1998)
• Language: English
• Format: Hardcover w/Deckle Edge – 537 pages
• ISBN-10: ‎ 0375501371
• ISBN-13: ‎ 978-0375501371
• Item Weight: ‎ 2.2 pounds
• Dimensions: ‎ 6.75 x 2 x 9.6 inches
• Book Condition: Used – Very Good
• Dust Jacket Condition: Very Good

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

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 crucial 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 in the fall of 1990, when Ruth 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.

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, Mr. Irving 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.

For more information about the author, please visit www.john-irving.com