A widow for one year - John Irving

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. Her 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 time we meet Ruth it is 1990, when she is an unmarried woman whose personal life is not nearly as successful as her literary career. She distrusts her judgement in men, for good reason. The book closes in 1995 when Ruth is forty-one years old, a widow and a 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.