She's about to fall in love for the first time. A Widow for One Yearcloses in the autumn of 1995, when Ruth Cole is a forty-one-year-old widow and mother. She distrusts her judgment in men, for good reason. The second window into Ruth's life opens on the fall of 1990, when Ruth is an unmarried woman whose personal life is not nearly as successful as her literary career.

When we first meet her-on Long Island, in the summer of 1958-Ruth is only four. Ruth's story is told in three parts, each focusing on a critical time in her life. By no means is she conventionally 'nice', but she will never be forgotten. Ruth Cole is a complex, often self-contradictory character-a 'difficult' woman. … ( more)ġ4 cassettes / 24 1/4 hours UNABRIDGED ' instincts are so basically sound, his talent for storytelling so bright and strong that he gets down to the truth of his time.' -The New York Times Book Review Twenty years afterThe World According to Garp, John Irving gives us a new novel about a family marked by tragedy. Both ribald and erotic, it is also a brilliant novel about the passage of time and the relentlessness of grief.

Richly comic, as well as deeply disturbing,A Widow for One Yearis a multilayered love story of astonishing emotional force.

14 cassettes / 24 1/4 hours UNABRIDGED ' instincts are so basically sound, his talent for storytelling so bright and strong that he gets down to the truth of his time.' -The New York Times Book Review Twenty years afterThe World According to Garp, John Irving gives us a new novel about a family marked by tragedy.

A widow for one year by john irving