John Irving's fifteenth novel is "powerfully cinematic" (The
Washington Post) and "eminently readable" (The Boston Globe).
The Last Chairlift is part ghost story, part love story,
spanning eight decades of sexual politics.
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, he will go to Aspen. In the Hotel Jerome, where he was
conceived, Adam will meet some ghosts; in The Last Chairlift, they
aren't the first or last ghosts he sees.
John Irving has written some of the most acclaimed books of our
time--among them, The World According to Garp and The Cider House
Rules. A visionary voice on the subject of sexual tolerance, Irving is
a bard of alternative families. In the "generously intertextual" (The
New York Times) The Last Chairlift, readers will once more be in his
thrall.
