List $49.95

Written by John Irving - Audio book performed by George Guidall (selected by AudioFile magazine for their Golden Voices Hall of Fame) - Unabridged Fiction - 14 CASSETTES - 24.25 hours

Publisher, Random House Audiobooks (1998)

1999 Audie Award Winner for Best Unabridged Fiction Audiobook, presented by the Audio Publishers Association for excellence in Spoken Audio publishing.

RECEIVED THE COVETED "AUDIOFILE EARPHONES AWARD" (October/November, 1998) FOR EXCEPTIONAL NARRATIVE VOICE AND STYLE, VOCAL CHARACTERIZATIONS, APPROPRIATENESS FOR AUDIO FORMAT AND ENHANCEMENT OF THE TEXT!

"[Irving's] 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 after The World According to Garp, John Irving gives us a new novel about a family marked by tragedy. Ruth Cole is a complex, often self-contradictory character--a "difficult" woman. By no means is she conventionally "nice," but she will never be forgotten.

Ruth's story is told in three parts, each focusing on a critical time in her life. When we first meet her--on Long Island, in the summer of 1958--Ruth is only four.

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. She distrusts her judgment in men, for good reason.

A Widow for One Year closes in the autumn of 1995, when Ruth Cole is a forty-one-year-old widow and mother. She's about to fall in love for the first time.

Richly comic, as well as deeply disturbing, A Widow for One Year is a multilayered love story of astonishing emotional force. Both ribald and erotic, it is also a brilliant novel about the passage of time and the relentlessness of grief.

"John Irving, it is abundantly clear, is a true artist." --Los Angeles Times