About the Author

JOHN IRVING was born in Exeter, New Hampshire, in 1942. His first novel, Setting Free the Bears, was published in 1968, when he was twenty-six. He has written sixteen novels over the course of his prolific career, the majority of which have been international bestsellers. In 1980, Irving won a National Book Award for his novel The World According to Garp. In 2000, he won the Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay for The Cider House Rules. An international writer, his books have been translated into more than thirty-five languages. A Prayer for Owen Meany is his best-selling novel, in every language. A dual citizen of the United States and Canada, John Irving lives in Toronto.

Irving’s longtime commitment to themes of tolerance for sexual minorities has made him a bard of alternative families and a visionary voice on the subject of sexual freedom. TIME magazine commends his books as “epic and extraordinary and controversial and sexually brave.” Irving is described as “the voice of social justice and compassion in contemporary American literature” by The Globe and Mail. His work is said to contain “devastating irony, quiet provocation, comical obsessions, priapic debauchery” (Le Monde), while his characters “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” (The Washington Post Book World). In the words of Terrence Des Pres, from his Introduction to John Irving, “Not fact but fact perceived is fiction’s rightful domain, and Irving has been quick to take this special license to its limit.” Time and again, readers have been captivated by Irving’s storytelling—by turns tragic and comic, embodied by unforgettable characters.

His most recent novel is Queen Esther, a historical novel that follows Esther Nacht, a Vienese-born Jew whose life is shaped by anti-Semitism. An orphan, Esther is left at the orphanage at St. Cloud’s, where it’s clear to Dr. Larch that the abandoned child not only knows she’s Jewish; she’s familiar with the biblical Queen Esther she was named for. Dr. Larch knows it won’t be easy to find a Jewish family to adopt Esther; he won’t find any family who’ll adopt her.

When Esther is fourteen, about to become a ward of the state, Dr. Larch meets the Winslows—a philanthropic family with a history of providing for unadopted orphans. The Winslows aren’t Jewish, but they detest anti-Semitism and like-minded prejudice. Esther’s gratitude to the Winslows is unending. While she retraces her steps to her birth city, Esther never stops loving and protecting the Winslows—not even in Vienna. In the final chapter of this historical novel—set in Jerusalem, in 1981—Esther Nacht is seventy-six.

You can read the Des Pres Introduction here

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