A Widow for One Year

A Widow for One Year

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Twenty years after The World According to Garp, the author chronicles the life of a complex, abrasive woman born in the shadow of her siblings' deaths and her parents' adultery, who only finds love after motherhood and widowhood. 

“One night when she was four and sleeping in the bottom bunk of her bunk bed, Ruth Cole woke to the sound of lovemaking—it was coming from her parents’ bedroom.”

This sentence opens John Irving’s ninth novel, A Widow for One Year, a story of a family marked by tragedy. Ruth Cole is a complex, often self-contradictory character—a “difficult” woman. By no means is she conventionally “nice,” but she will never be forgotten.

Ruth’s story is told in three parts, each focusing on a critical time in her life. When we first meet her—on Long Island, in the summer of 1958—Ruth is only four.

The second window into Ruth’s life opens on the fall of 1990, when she is an unmarried woman whose personal life is not nearly as successful as her literary career. She distrusts her judgment in men, for good reason.

A Widow for One Year closes in the autumn of 1995, when Ruth Cole is a forty-one-year-old widow and mother. She’s about to fall in love for the first time.

Richly comic, as well as deeply disturbing, A Widow for One Year is a multilayered love story of astonishing emotional force. Both ribald and erotic, it is also a brilliant novel about the passage of time and the relentlessness of grief.


Book details

  • Paperback
  • 537 pages
  • English
  • 0375501371
  • 9780375501371

About John Irving

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 competed Read More about John Irving
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