About the Book
For readers or moviegoers who know The Cider House Rules, a familiar character reappears in QUEEN ESTHER—John Irving’s sixteenth novel. Dr. Wilbur Larch is younger than you remember him, and the unadopted orphans at St. Cloud’s are a different cast of characters—a Viennese-born Jew, Esther Nacht, among them. Like The Cider House Rules, QUEEN ESTHER is a historical novel with a political theme. Anti-Semitism shapes Esther’s life, not only in Vienna. Esther’s story is fated to intersect with Israel’s history.
One of the world’s greatest authors returns with his first novel in seven years—a ghost story and a love story, spanning eight decades of sexual politics.
Juan Diego—a fourteen-year-old boy, who was born and grew up in Mexico—has a thirteen-year-old sister. Her name is Lupe, and she thinks she sees what’s coming—specifically, her own future and her brother’s. Lupe is a mind reader; she doesn’t know what everyone is thinking, but she knows what most people are thinking. Regarding what has happened, as opposed to what will, Lupe is usually right about the past; without your telling her, she knows all the worst things that have happened to you.
As a novelist, I know something that works better than any synopsis of what a new novel is about. You would be better off reading the first few paragraphs of the first chapter, because that’s all the author wanted you to know about the book before you start reading it for yourself. Believe me: the author just wants you to begin reading.
Billy is not me. He comes from my imagining what I might have been like if I’d acted on all my earliest impulses as a young teenager… As Billy learns—in part, from being bisexual—our genders and orientations do not define us. We are somehow greater than our sexual identities, but our sexual identities matter. —John Irving