About this item
Highlights
- "A remarkable novel. . . .
- Author(s): John Irving
- 656 Pages
- Fiction + Literature Genres, Literary
Description
About the Book
"P.S. insights, interviews & more..."--Cover.Book Synopsis
"A remarkable novel. . . . A Prayer for Owen Meany is a rare creation. ... An amazingly brave piece of work ... so extraordinary, so original, and so enriching. . . . Readers will come to the end feeling sorry to leave [this] richly textured and carefully wrought world." --STEPHEN KING, Washington Post
I am doomed to remember a boy with a wrecked voice--not because of his voice, or because he was the smallest person I ever knew, or even because he was the instrument of my mother's death, but because he is the reason I believe in God; I am a Christian because of Owen Meany.
In the summer of 1953, two eleven-year-old boys--best friends--are playing in a Little League baseball game in Gravesend, New Hampshire. One of the boys hits a foul ball that kills the other boy's mother. The boy who hits the ball doesn't believe in accidents; Owen Meany believes he is God's instrument. What happens to Owen after that 1953 foul ball is extraordinary.
A PBS Great American Read Top 100 Pick
From the Back Cover
I am doomed to remember a boy with a wrecked voice--not because of his voice, or because he was the smallest person I ever knew, or even because he was the instrument of my mother's death, but because he is the reason I believe in God; I am a Christian because of Owen Meany.
In the summer of 1953, two eleven-year-old boys--best friends--are playing in a Little League baseball game in Gravesend, New Hampshire. One of the boys hits a foul ball that kills the other boy's mother. The boy who hits the ball doesn't believe in accidents; Owen Meany believes he is God's instrument. What happens to Owen after that 1953 foul ball is extraordinary.
Review Quotes
"A remarkable novel. . . . A Prayer for Owen Meany is a rare creation in the somehow exhausted world of late twentieth-century fiction--it is an amazingly brave piece of work . . . so extraordinary, so original, and so enriching. . . . Readers will come to the end feeling sorry to leave [this] richly textured and carefully wrought world." -- STEPHEN KING, Washington Post
"The magic of A Prayer for Owen Meany is that it forces us into a confrontation with our own carapaces of skepticism . . . It is a brave and subtly disturbing affirmation of faith, and it is all the more remarkable for its engagement with the deepest questions, the most painful mysteries of our lives." -- Los Angeles Times
"Among the very best American novels of our time." -- Charlotte Observer
"[A] great novel." -- Dallas Morning News
"A work of genius." -- Independent (London)
"A heartbreaking masterpiece of a novel." -- Sunday Express (London)