Last Night in Twisted River: A Novel - Softcover

Irving, John

3.78

26,924 ratings by Goodreads

9780345523778: Last Night in Twisted River: A Novel

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0345523776 ISBN 13: 9780345523778

Publisher: Random House LLC US, 2010

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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 them. In a story spanning five decades, Last Night in Twisted River - John Irving's twelfth novel - depicts the recent half-century in the United States as 'a living replica of Coos County, where lethal hatreds were generally permitted to run their course'. From the novel's taut opening sentence - 'The young Canadian, who could not have been more than fifteen, had hesitated too long' - to its elegiac final chapter, Last Night in Twisted River is written with the historical authenticity and emotional authority of The Cider House Rules and A Prayer for Owen Meany. It is also as violent and disturbing a story as John Irving's breakthrough bestseller, The World According to Garp. What further distinguishes Last Night in Twisted River is the author's unmistakable voice - the inimitable voice of an accomplished storyteller. Near the end of this moving novel, John Irving writes: 'We don't always have a choice how we get to know one another. Sometimes, people fall into our lives cleanly - as if out of the sky, or as if there were a direct flight from Heaven to Earth - the same sudden way we lose people, who once seemed they would always be part of our lives'.

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Review:

"Last Night in Twisted River is a big, old-fashioned novel in the best sense; Irving has created in painstaking, loving detail a whole and complete world, a record of momentous social changes, but, above all a testament to the enduring power of love and fiction" (Observer)

"A page-turner in the smartest possible sense, written with the historical authenticity and taut command of language that has established Irving as one of America's greatest living novelists" (GQ)

"The most poetic and powerful of Irving's work to date" (Independent on Sunday)

Book Description:

A breathtaking story of a father and a son in 20th-century North America from the award-winning author of A Prayer for Owen Meany.

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