Ruth grows up in the home of her father, the children’s book author Ted Cole. So their marriage breaks up and for a while, they takes turn taking care of Ruth but finally, Ruth’s mother Marion leaves her husband and child, knowing that she doesn’t dare to love Ruth because she can’t bear to loose another child. Neither of them realizing that of course you can’t replace children – or what to do if they got a girl and not a third boy. Ruth is conceived by her parents to make up for the fact that they’ve lost their two boys in a car accident. And as the chapter is called ‘The Inadequate Lampshade’, you already have a pretty good idea what’s going on – and what kind of book this is. While Ruth makes her way from her bed to her mother’s bedroom, we are introduced to a shattered family where the mother and father don’t live together anymore, with two older brothers who are deceased and whose pictures are all over the walls of the house. Having recently been ill herself, she thinks her mother is sick so she goes through the bathroom, picks up a bucket and enters her mother’s bedroom – where she finds her mother busy making love to a 16-years old boy. When we meet Ruth, she is a little girl being awaken in the night by strange sounds coming from her mother’s bedroom. John Irving draws you in from the first page.

First as a four-years old in 1958, then in 1990 when she’s a single woman earning her living as an author and finally in 1995 when she’s forty-one years old and both a widow and a mother. This is the story of Ruth Cole who we follow at three points in her life. He is just always awesome.Īnd this book is no exception. Murakami gets too weird at times and Pratchett is … well, never a disappointment, but not always at his funniest. King and Oates write so many books that there’s bound to be some misses among them. Out of my five favorite authors – Stephen King, Joyce Carol Oates, Terry Pratchett, Haruki Murakami and John Irving – there’s one author who never disappoints. ‘That Ruth Cole would grow up to be that rare combination of a well-respected literary novelist and an internationally best-selling author is not as remarkable as the fact that she managed to grow up at all.’ (p.

A widow for one year by john irving