"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**
