"Homer Wells had been raised from birth in the boys' division of the orphanage at St. Cloud's, Maine. Now a young man, he was the protege of Dr. Wilbur Larch, the orphanage physician and director, Dr. Larch provides care and comfort to the troubled mothers who seek his help, either by delivering and taking in their unwanted babies or by performing illegal abortions. Meticulously trained in medicine by Dr. Larch, Homer assists in the former, but draws...

A girl discovers her mother in bed with a teenage boy and later the mother abandons her. Meanwhile, her father is seducing young girls. So begins the story of Ruth Cole, a famous writer struggling to overcome childhood traumas and find love.

In 1954, in the cookhouse of a logging and sawmill settlement in northern New Hampshire, an anxious twelve-year-old boy mistakes the local constable’s girlfriend for a bear. Both the twelve-year-old and his father become fugitives, forced to run from Coos County—to Boston, to southern Vermont, to Toronto—pursued by the implacable constable. Their lone protector is a fiercely libertarian logger, once a river driver, who befriends...

The story of the actor Jack Burns. His mother, Alice, is a Toronto tattoo artist. When Jack is four, he travels with Alice to several North Sea ports; they are trying to find Jack's missing father, William, a church organist who is addicted to being tattooed. But Alice is a mystery, and William can't be found. Even Jack's memories are subject to doubt. Jack Burns goes to schools in Canada and New England, but what shapes him are his relationships...

“Irving looks cunningly beyond the eye-catching gyrations of the mating dance to the morning-after implications.”—The Washington Post

The darker vision and sexual ambiguities of this sensual, ironic tale about a ménage a quatre in a New England university town foreshadow those of The World According to Garp; but this very trim and precise novel is a marked departure from the author's generally...

Trying to Save Piggy Sneed contains a dozen short works by John Irving, beginning with three memoirs, including an account of Mr. Irving's dinner with President Ronald Reagan at the White House. The longest of the memoirs, “The Imaginary Girlfriend," is the core of this collection.
The middle section of the book is fiction. Since the publication of his first novel, Setting Free the Bears, in 1968, John Irving has written twelve

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A Hindi film star, an American missionary, a pair of twins separated at birth, a diminutive chauffeur, and a serial killer collide in a riotous novel by the author of The World According to Garp
“His most entertaining novel since Garp.”—The New York Times Book Review

“A Son of the Circus is comic genius . . . get ready for [John] Irving's most raucous novel to date.”—The...

The author's most political novel since The Cider House Rules and A Prayer for Owen Meany, this novel is an intimate and unforgettable portrait of the solitariness of a bisexual man who is dedicated to making himself worthwhile.

Tells a compelling and heartwarming story about how far a young man must travel to find the place where he truly belongs. Homer has lived nearly his entire life within the walls of an orphanage in rural Maine and has been groomed by its proprietor to be his successor. But Homer falls in love and strikes out on his own.

Garp is a man whose life unfolds from cradle to grave in counterpoint to the dizzy, violent, cruel and casually destructive rhythms of our anxious age. Whilst Garp sees himself as a "serious" writer, his mother Jenny writes a feminist manifesto at an opportune time, and finds herself as a magnet for all manner of distressed women.