"A SON OF THE CIRCUS IS COMIC GENIUS....GET READY FOR IRVING'S MOST RAUCOUS NOVEL TO DATE."
--The Boston Globe
"Dr. Farrokh Daruwalla, reared in Bombay by maverick foes of tradition, educated in Vienna, married to an Austrian and long a resident of Toronto, is a 59-year-old without a country, culture or religion to call his own....The novel may not be 'about' India, but Irving's imagined India, which Daruwalla visits periodically, is a remarkable achievement--a pandemonium of servants and clubmen, dwarf clowns and transvestite whores, missionaries and movie stars. This is a land of energetic colliding egos, of modern media clashing with ancient cultures, of broken sexual boundaries."
--New York Newsday
"HIS MOST DARING AND MOST VIBRANT NOVEL...The story of circus-as-India is told with gusto and delightful irreverence."
--Bharati Mukherjee
The Washington Post Book World
"Ringmaster Irving introduces act after act, until three (or more) rings are awhirl at a lunatic pace....[He] spills characters from his imagination as agilely as improbable numbers of clowns pile out of a tiny car....His Bombay and his Indian characters are vibrant and convincing."
--The Wall Street Journal
"IRRESISTIBLE...POWERFUL...Irving's gift for dialogue shines."
--Chicago Tribune


From the Paperback edition.

The main character of John Irving's second novel, written when the author was twenty-nine, is a perpetual graduate student with a birth defect in his urinary tract--and a man on the threshold of committing himself to a second marriage that bears remarkable resemblance to his first....
"Three or four times as funny as most novels."
THE NEW YORKER


From the Paperback edition.

Here is a treat for John Irving addicts and a perfect introduction to his work for the uninitiated.  To open this spirited collection, Irving explains how he became a writer.  There follow six scintillating stories written over the last twenty years ending with a homage to Charles Dickens.  This irresistible collection cannot fail to delight and charm.

"The first of my father's illusions was that bears could survive the life lived by human beings, and the second was that human beings could survive a life led in hotels."
So says John Berry, son of a hapless dreamer, brother to a cadre of eccentric siblings, and chronicler of the lives lived, the loves experienced, the deaths met, and the myriad strange and wonderful times encountered by the family Berry. Hoteliers, pet-bear owners, friends of Freud (the animal trainer and vaudevillian, that is), and playthings of mad fate, they "dream on" in a funny, sad, outrageous, and moving novel by the remarkable author of A Son of the Circus and A Prayer for Owen Meany.
"Like Garp, [THE HOTEL NEW HAMPSHIRE] is a startlingly original family saga that combines macabre humor with Dickensian sentiment and outrage at cruelty, dogmatism and injustice."
--Time
"Rejoice! John Irving has written another book according to your world....You must read this book."
--Los Angeles Times
"Spellbinding...Intensely human...A high-wire act of dazzling virtuosity."
--Cosmopolitan

'AN OLD-FASHIONED, BIG-HEARTED NOVEL . . . with its epic yearning caught in the 19th century, somewhere between Trollope and Twain . . . The rich detail makes for vintage Irving.'
--The Boston Sunday Globe

'The Cider House Rules is filled with people to love and to feel for. . . . The characters in John Irving's novel break all the rules, and yet they remain noble and free-spirited. Victims of tragedy, violence, and injustice, their lives seem more interesting and full of thought-provoking dilemmas than the lives of many real people.'
--The Houston Post

'John Irving's sixth and best novel . . . He is among the very best storytellers at work today. At the base of Irving's own moral concerns is a rare and lasting regard for human kindness.'
--The Philadelphia Inquirer

'Entertaining and affecting . . . John Irving is the most relentlessly inventive writer around. He proliferates colorful incidents and crotchets of character. . . . A truly astounding amount of artistry and ingenuity.'
--The San Diego Union

20th ANNIVERSARY EDITION
with a new Afterword from the author



The New York Times bestseller



This is the life and times of T. S. Garp, the bastard son of Jenny
Fields--a feminist leader ahead of her times.  This is the life and death
of a famous mother and her almost-famous son; theirs is a world of sexual
extremes--even of sexual assassinations.  It is a novel rich with 'lunacy
and sorrow'; yet the dark, violent events of the story do not undermine a
comedy both ribald and robust.  In more than thirty languages, in more than
forty countries--with more than ten million copies in print--this novel
provides almost cheerful, even hilarious evidence of its famous last line:
'In the world according to Garp, we are all terminal cases.'

In the marshy mists of a village churchyard, a  tiny orphan boy named Pip is suddenly terrified by a  shivering, limping convict on the run. Years  later, a supremely arrogant young Pip boards the coach  to London where, by the grace of a mysterious  benefactor, he will join the ranks of the idle rich  and 'become a gentleman.' Finally, in the  luminous mists of the village at evening, Pip the  man meets Estella, his dazzingly beautiful  tormentor, in a ruined garden--and lays to rest all the  heartaches and illusions that his 'great  expectations' have brought upon him. Dickens's  biographer, Edgar H. Johnson, has said that--except  for the author's last-minute tampering with his  original ending--Great Expectations  is 'the most perfectly constructed and  perfectly written of all Dickens's works.' In John  Irving's Introduction to this edition, the  novelist takes the view that Dickens's revised ending is  'far more that mirror of the quality of trust in  the novel as a whole.' Both versions of the  ending are printed here.

The main character of John Irving's second novel, written when the author was twenty-nine, is a perpetual graduate student with a birth defect in his urinary tract--and a man on the threshold of committing himself to a second marriage that bears remarkable resemblance to his first....
"Three or four times as funny as most novels."
THE NEW YORKER

Owen Meany, the only child of a New Hampshire granite quarrier, believes he is God's instrument; he is.
This is John Irving's most comic novel, yet Owen Meany is Mr. Irving's most heartbreaking character.
"Roomy, intelligent, exhilarating and darkly comic...Dickensian in scope....Quite stunning and very ambitious."
LOS ANGELES TIMES BOOK REVIEW
"John Irving is an abundantly and even joyfully talented storyteller."
THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOKR EVIEW