Queen Esther Hardcover by John Irving

Product Details

• Publisher: Knopf Canada (2025-11-04)
• Language: English
• Paperback: 432 pages
• ISBN-13: 9780735276246
• Item Weight: 606.69 grams
• Dimensions: 9.52 x 6.5 x 1.38 cm

After forty years, John Irving returns to the world of his bestselling classic novel and Academy Award winner The Cider House Rules, revisiting the orphanage in St. Cloud's, Maine, where Dr. Larch takes in Esther, a three-year-old Jew whose life is shaped by anti-Semitism.

Esther Nacht is born in Vienna in 1905. Her father dies on board a ship from Bremerhaven to Portland, Maine, and anti-Semites murder her mother in Portland. In St. Cloud’s, it’s clear to Dr. Larch, the orphanage physician and director, that the abandoned child not only knows she’s Jewish, but she’s familiar with the biblical Queen Esther she was named for. Dr. Larch knows it won’t be easy to find a Jewish family to adopt Esther, he doubts he'll find any family to adopt her.

When Esther is fourteen, soon to become a ward of the state, Dr. Larch meets the Winslows, a philanthropic family with a history of providing for unadopted orphans. The Winslows aren’t Jewish, but they detest anti-Semitism and similar prejudice. Esther’s gratitude to the Winslows is unending. As she retraces her steps to her birth city, Esther keeps loving and protecting the Winslows—even in Vienna.

The final chapter of this historical novel is set in Jerusalem in 1981, when Esther is seventy-six.

About the Author

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 as a wrestler for twenty years and coached wrestling until he was forty-seven. He is a member of the National Wrestling Hall of Fame in Stillwater, Oklahoma.

In 1980, Mr. Irving won a National Book Award for his novel The World According to Garp. In 2000, he won the Oscar for Best Adapted Screeplay for The Cider House Rules.In 2013, he won a Lambda Literary Award for his novel In One Person. Internationally renowned, his novels have been translated into almost forty languages. His all-time bestselling novel, in every language, is A Prayer for Owen Meany. 

A dual citizen of the United States and Canada, John Irving lives in Toronto. Queen Esther is his sixteenth novel.