A Widow for One Year

Summer 1958
The Inadequate Lamp Shade

One night when she was four and sleeping in the bottom bunk of her bunk bed, Ruth Cole woke to the sound of lovemaking--it was coming from her parents' bedroom. It was a totally unfamiliar sound to her. Ruth had recently been ill with a stomach flu; when she first heard her mother making love, Ruth thought that her mother was throwing up.

It was not as simple a matter as her parents having separate bedrooms; that summer they had separate houses, although Ruth never saw the other house. Her parents spent alternate nights in the family house with Ruth; there was a rental house nearby, where Ruth's mother or father stayed when they weren't staying with Ruth. It was one of those ridiculous arrangements that couples make when they are separating, but before they are divorced--when they still imagine that children and property can be shared with more magnanimity than recrimination.

When Ruth woke to the foreign sound, she at first wasn't sure if it was her mother or her father who was throwing up; then, despite the unfamiliarity of the disturbance, Ruth recognized that measure of melancholy and contained hysteria which was often detectable in her mother's voice. Ruth also remembered that it was her mother's turn to stay with her.

The master bathroom separated Ruth's room from the master bedroom. When the four-year-old padded barefoot through the bathroom, she took a towel with her. (When she'd been sick with the stomach flu, her father had encouraged her to vomit in a towel.) Poor Mommy! Ruth thought, bringing her the towel.

In the dim moonlight, and in the even dimmer and erratic light from the night-light that Ruth's father had installed in the bathroom, Ruth saw the pale faces of her dead brothers in the photographs on the bathroom wall. There were photos of her dead brothers throughout the house, on all the walls; although the two boys had died as teenagers, before Ruth was born (before she was even

John Irving

By turns antic and moving, lusty and tragic, A Widow for One Year is bursting with memorable moments. San Francisco Examiner-Chronicle

Wisely and carefully crafted . . . Irving is among the few novelists who can write a novel about grief and fill it with ribald humor soaked in irony. USA Today

Deeply affecting . . . The pleasures of this rich and beautiful book are manifold. To be human is to savor them. Los Angeles Times Book Review

A powerful tale to add to an already extraordinary body of work from a great American writer. Richmond Times-Dispatch

Masterful . . . powerful . . . Irving s best books are Dickensian in their rich characters, plotting and language and of course, in moving the reader. On the final page of A Widow for One Year . . . I literally burst out crying. Orlando Sentinel

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

Enchantingly balances the haunting tug of grief with the lure of enduring love . . . Irving s rich narrative and his sense of play result in a delicious collusion between author and reader. Raleigh News & Observer

Wonderfully