“Usually, the dwarfs kept bringing him back—back to the circus and back to India.”

–Opening lines of John Irving’s A Son of the Circus.

Born a Parsi in Bombay, sent to university and medical school in Vienna, Dr. Farrokh Daruwalla is a Canadian citizen—a fifty-nine-year-old orthopedic surgeon, living in Toronto.  Once, twenty years ago, Dr. Daruwalla was the examining physician of two murder victims in Goa.  Now, two decades later, the doctor will be reacquainted with the murderer…

“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