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  • Published: 1 September 2006
  • ISBN: 9780552773126
  • Imprint: Black Swan
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 960
  • RRP: $27.99

Until I Find You



A tragic-comic classic from one of the world's greatest living writers.

'According to his mother, Jack Burns was an actor before he was an actor, but Jack's most vivid memories of childhood were those moments when he felt compelled to hold his mother's hand. He wasn't acting then.'

Jack Burns' mother, Alice, is a tattoo artist in search of the boy's father, a virtuoso organist named William who has fled America to Europe. To fund her journey, she plies her trade in the seaports of the Baltic coast. But her four-year-old son's errant father can't be found, and soon even Jack's memories of that perplexing time are called into question. It is only when he becomes a Hollywood actor in later life that what he has experienced in the past comes into telling play in his present......

  • Published: 1 September 2006
  • ISBN: 9780552773126
  • Imprint: Black Swan
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 960
  • RRP: $27.99

About the author

John Irving

John Irving was born in Exeter, New Hampshire, in 1942, and he once admitted that he was a 'grim' child. Although he excelled in English at school and knew by the time he graduated that he wanted to write novels, it was not until he met a young Southern novelist named John Yount, at the University of New Hampshire, that he received encouragement. 'It was so simple,' he remembers. 'Yount was the first person to point out that anything I did except writing was going to be vaguely unsatisfying.'

The World According to Garp, which won the National Book Award in 1980, was John Irving's fourth novel and his first international bestseller; it also became a George Roy Hill film. Tony Richardson wrote and directed the adaptation for the screen of The Hotel New Hampshire (1984). Irving's novels are now translated into thirty-five foreign languages, and he has had nine international bestsellers. Worldwide, the Irving novel most often called "an American classic" is A Prayer for Owen Meany (1989), the portrayal of an enduring friendship at that time when the Vietnam War had its most divisive effect on the United States.

In 1992, Mr. Irving was inducted into the National Wrestling Hall of Fame in Stillwater, Oklahoma. (He competed as a wrestler for twenty years, until he was thirty-four, and coached the sport until he was forty-seven). In 2000, Irving won the Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay for The Cider House Rules-a Lasse Hallström film with seven Academy Award nominations. Tod Williams wrote and directed The Door in the Floor, the 2004 film adapted from Mr. Irving's ninth novel, A Widow for One Year. In One Person is John Irving's thirteenth novel.

John Irving has three children and lives in Vermont and Toronto.

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Praise for Until I Find You

Irving's popularity is not too difficult to understand. His world really is the world according to everyone

Time

John Irving has been compared to Kurt Vonnegut and J.D. Salinger, but is arguably more inventive than either. Wry, laconic, he sketches his characters with an economy that springs from a feeling for words and a mastery of his craft

The Times

Irving writes with a lapidary directness that is unsurpassed by any living writer

Sunday Telegraph

It is very satisfying to read a book that is hard to put down, and if this were a more valued criterion, Irving would no doubt by now have received the official accolades he deserves

Financial Times

A premier storyteller, master of the tragiocomic and among the first rank of contemporary novelists

Los Angeles Times

Irving is peerless at presenting action, writing without a wasted second

Guardian

Vivid, eccentric, memorable

Independent

Immensely moving and shot through with wit, humour and sadness, this book is addictive

Red