His most political novel since The Cider House Rules and A Prayer for Owen Meany, John Irving's In One Person is an intimate and unforgettable portrait of the solitariness of a bisexual man who is dedicated to making himself "worthwhile."
Advance praise for John Irving's In One Person:
"This tender exploration of nascent desire, of love and loss, manages to be sweeping, brilliant, political, provocative, tragic, and funny--it is precisely the kind of astonishing alchemy we associate with a John Irving novel. The unfolding of the AIDS epidemic in the United States in the '80s was the defining moment for me as a physician. With my patients' deaths, almost always occurring in the prime of life, I would find myself cataloging the other losses--namely, what these people might have offered society had they lived the full measure of their days: their art, their literature, the children they might have raised. In One Person is the novel that for me will define that era. A profound truth is arrived at in these pages. It is Irving at his most daring, at his most ambitious. It is America and American writing, both at their very best." --Abraham Verghese, author of Cutting for Stone and My Own Country
"In One Person is a novel that makes you proud to be human. It is a book that not only accepts but also loves our differences. From the beginning of his career, Irving has always cherished our peculiarities--in a fierce, not a saccharine, way. Now he has extended his sympathies--and ours--still further into areas that even the misfits eschew. Anthropologists say that the interstitial--whatever lies between two familiar opposites--is usually declared either taboo or sacred. John Irving in this magnificent novel--his best and most passionate since The World According to Garp--has sacralized what lies between polarizing genders and orientations. And have I mentioned it is also a gripping page-turner and a beautifully constructed work of art?" --Edmund White, author of City Boy and Genet: A Biography
Advance praise for John Irving's In One Person:
"This tender exploration of nascent desire, of love and loss, manages to be sweeping, brilliant, political, provocative, tragic, and funny--it is precisely the kind of astonishing alchemy we associate with a John Irving novel. The unfolding of the AIDS epidemic in the United States in the '80s was the defining moment for me as a physician. With my patients' deaths, almost always occurring in the prime of life, I would find myself cataloging the other losses--namely, what these people might have offered society had they lived the full measure of their days: their art, their literature, the children they might have raised. In One Person is the novel that for me will define that era. A profound truth is arrived at in these pages. It is Irving at his most daring, at his most ambitious. It is America and American writing, both at their very best." --Abraham Verghese, author of Cutting for Stone and My Own Country
"In One Person is a novel that makes you proud to be human. It is a book that not only accepts but also loves our differences. From the beginning of his career, Irving has always cherished our peculiarities--in a fierce, not a saccharine, way. Now he has extended his sympathies--and ours--still further into areas that even the misfits eschew. Anthropologists say that the interstitial--whatever lies between two familiar opposites--is usually declared either taboo or sacred. John Irving in this magnificent novel--his best and most passionate since The World According to Garp--has sacralized what lies between polarizing genders and orientations. And have I mentioned it is also a gripping page-turner and a beautifully constructed work of art?" --Edmund White, author of City Boy and Genet: A Biography
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