A Widow for One Year A Novel [Paperback]

InA Widow for One Year,we follow Ruth Cole through three of the most pivotal times in her life: from her girlhood on Long Island (in the summer of 1958) through the fall of 1990 (when she is an unmarried woman whose personal life is not nearly as successful as her literary career), and at last in the autumn of 1995, when Ruth is a forty-one-year-old widow and mother (and she’s about to fall in love for the first time). Both elegiac and erotic,A Widow for One Yearis a multilayered love story of astonishing emotional force.“By turns antic and moving, lusty and tragic, A Widow for One Yearis bursting with memorable moments.”—San Francisco Examiner-Chronicle

“Wisely and carefully crafted . . . Irving is among the few novelists who can write a novel about grief and fill it with ribald humor soaked in irony.”—USA Today

“Deeply affecting . . . The pleasures of this rich and beautiful book are manifold. To be human is to savor them.”—Los Angeles Times Book Review

“A powerful tale to add to an already extraordinary body of work from a great American writer.”—Richmond Times-Dispatch

“Masterful . . . powerful . . . Irving’s best books are Dickensian in their rich characters, plotting and language—and of course, in moving the reader. On the final page ofA Widow for One Year. . . I literally burst out crying.”—Orlando Sentinel

“A sprawling 19th-century production, chock full of bizarre coincidences, multiple plot lines, lengthy digressions, and stories within stories. . . . An engaging and often affecting fable, a fairy tale that manages to be old-fashioned and modern all at once.”—The New York Times

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