Last Night In Twisted River

In 1954 in the cookhouse of a logging and sawmill
settlement in northern New Hampshire an anxious
twelve-year-old boy mistakes the local constable’s
girlfriend for a bear. Both the twelve-year-old and his
father become fugitives forced to run from Coos County–to
Boston to southern Vermont to Toronto–pursued by the
implacable constable. Their lone protector is a fiercely
libertarian logger once a river driver who befriends them.
In a story spanning five decades Last Night in Twisted
River–John Irving’s twelfth novel–depicts the recent
half-century in the United States as “a living replica of
Coos County where lethal hatreds were generally permitted
to run their course.” From the novel’s taut opening
sentence–“The young Canadian who could not have been more
than fifteen had hesitated too long”–to its elegiac final
chapter Last Night in Twisted River is written with the
historical authenticity and emotional authority of The
Cider House Rules and A Prayer for Owen Meany. It is also
as violent and disturbing a story as John Irving’s
breakthrough bestseller The World According to Garp. What
further distinguishes Last Night in Twisted River is the
author’s unmistakable voice–the inimitable voice of an
accomplished storyteller. Near the end of this moving
novel John Irving writes: “We don’t always have a choice
how we get to know one another. Sometimes people fall into
our lives cleanly–as if out of the sky or as if there were
a direct flight from Heaven to Earth–the same sudden way
we lose people who once seemed they would always be part
of our lives.”