Author Guide · Literary Fiction
Books Written by
Irving writes the last sentence of a novel before he writes anything else, then plots backwards to the first. He learned the discipline for that from twenty years of competitive wrestling, and he learned the shape of his books from Dickens: long, densely plotted, full of coincidence and orphans and sudden fatal accidents. He has been writing the same handful of obsessions for nearly sixty years — absent fathers, New England, Vienna, bears, abortion rights, people who do not fit — and he is entirely unapologetic about it. This is everything he has published.
By Lisanne Swart · 16 novels · 21 books · Literary Fiction · Updated September 2026
Irving on wrestling, Dickens, and writing the ending first
Quick facts about John Irving
Setting Free the Bears
Two Austrian students plan to liberate the animals of the Vienna zoo, and the novel splits open into a wartime history of the city. Written when Irving was twenty-six, after his student year in Vienna.
The Water-Method Man
A perpetual graduate student with a urological complaint, a failing marriage and a doctoral thesis in a dead language. His funniest early book and the one where the comic timing arrives.
The 158-Pound Marriage
Two couples swap partners and it goes exactly as badly as it should. Short, dark and tightly controlled — the title is a wrestling weight class, and the book is built like a match.
The World According to Garp
T.S. Garp, novelist, and his mother Jenny Fields, a nurse who becomes an accidental feminist icon by writing a memoir she never meant as a manifesto. Comedy and catastrophe alternate without warning until the two become indistinguishable.
The book that made him famous and still the best argument for him. It is also genuinely violent in ways the reputation does not prepare you for.
The Hotel New Hampshire
A family runs three hotels — Maine, Vienna, Maine again — and absorbs an implausible amount of grief while telling itself a fairy tale about itself. Includes a bear, a dog called Sorrow and one of his most divisive plot turns.
The most fairy-tale-shaped of his novels, and the one readers either love without reservation or cannot forgive.
The Cider House Rules
Homer Wells grows up in a Maine orphanage run by Dr. Wilbur Larch, an ether-addicted obstetrician who also performs illegal abortions and believes it is the only decent thing to do. Larch reads Dickens aloud to the boys' wing every night.
The novel where the arguing and the storytelling are perfectly balanced. It is a book with a position, and it never stops being a novel to make the point.
A Prayer for Owen Meany
Owen Meany is tiny, has a wrecked and unmistakable voice, accidentally kills his best friend's mother with a foul ball, and is certain he is God's instrument. Narrated in retrospect by that friend, from Toronto, decades later.
His most loved book by a distance, and the one that converts people. Everything set up in the first fifty pages pays off in the last twenty, which is the whole Irving method working perfectly once.
A Son of the Circus
An Indian-Canadian orthopaedic surgeon moves between Toronto and Bombay, entangled with a circus, the film industry and a serial killer. His longest and most chaotic novel.
A Widow for One Year
The novelist Ruth Cole in three time frames — 1958, 1990, 1995 — beginning with the summer a sixteen-year-old writer's assistant arrives at her parents' house on Long Island.
The first third is as good as anything he has written, and was filmed on its own as The Door in the Floor.
The Fourth Hand
A television journalist loses his left hand to a lion on live air and is offered a transplant by a widow with conditions attached. His lightest late novel.
Until I Find You
An actor searches Europe for the tattoo-artist mother and church-organist father he half remembers. Over eight hundred pages, and his most autobiographical book.
Last Night in Twisted River
A logging-camp cook and his son spend fifty years on the run from a single accident in 1954 New Hampshire. The son becomes a novelist, and the book quietly becomes about how fiction gets made.
Underrated. The long view of a life spent hiding is something he does better here than anywhere else.
In One Person
Billy Abbott, bisexual, from a 1950s New England prep school through the AIDS years, telling his own story and the stories of the people he lost. Won the Lambda Literary Award.
The book where his lifelong interest in people who do not fit stops being a subplot and becomes the subject.
Avenue of Mysteries
A Mexican novelist who grew up scavenging a Oaxaca dump travels to the Philippines, moving between the trip and the memories that keep overtaking it.
The Last Chairlift
Nine hundred pages beginning with a pregnant slalom skier in 1941 Aspen and ending as a ghost story about an American family. His longest book by some margin.
Queen Esther
His sixteenth novel returns to Dr. Wilbur Larch and the St. Cloud's orphanage of The Cider House Rules, following Esther Nacht — a Vienna-born Jewish orphan taken in by a New England family — from 1905 to Jerusalem in 1981.
Going back to St. Cloud's after forty years is either a gift to his readers or a writer running low on new rooms, and honestly it is a bit of both.
Also published
Five books outside the novels:
- The Imaginary Girlfriend (1996) — A short memoir about writing and wrestling, and about his two teachers — the coach Ted Seabrooke and the novelist Kurt Vonnegut.
- Trying to Save Piggy Sneed (1996) — Twelve pieces in three parts — memoir, fiction and homage — each with an author's note explaining where it came from.
- The Cider House Rules: A Screenplay (1999) — The shooting script, with a foreword on the thirteen years and four directors it took to make.
- My Movie Business: A Memoir (1999) — On adapting his own novel, and on the history of abortion in America that sits underneath it.
- A Sound Like Someone Trying Not to Make a Sound (2004) — A children's picture book, expanded from the bedtime story inside A Widow for One Year.
John Irving's Writing Style: The Ending First, and Everything Else Backwards
Irving's method is unusually literal and he has never varied it: “I never begin a novel until I've written that last sentence.” He works out the ending, then the final chapter, then reverse-engineers the plot back to the opening, drafting longhand in notebooks. When a book is going he works seven days a week. It is why his novels feel so tightly engineered despite running six or eight hundred pages — every coincidence in chapter four is there because he already knows what it has to do in chapter forty.
The model is nineteenth-century, and he says so. Dickens above all, plus Hardy and Melville: big casts, improbable connections, comic set pieces sitting directly beside deaths. Modern literary fiction generally treats coincidence as a failure of craft; Irving treats it as the point, because he is writing about fate rather than psychology.
The tonal signature is the whiplash. A scene will be funny for three pages and then someone will die, mid-sentence, without any tonal warning. Readers who dislike him usually dislike exactly this, and they are not wrong that it is manipulative — it is meant to be. It is his argument about how catastrophe actually arrives.
And the obsessions repeat by design: wrestling, bears, Vienna, New England prep schools, absent or unknown fathers, orphans, tattoos, sex workers, abortion, and writers as protagonists. He has been accused of writing the same novel sixteen times. The fairer version is that he has been writing sixteen approaches to one question — what a person owes a family that did not choose them.
John Irving Books in Order
The novels in publication order: Setting Free the Bears (1968), The Water-Method Man (1972), The 158-Pound Marriage (1974), The World According to Garp (1978), The Hotel New Hampshire (1981), The Cider House Rules (1985), A Prayer for Owen Meany (1989), A Son of the Circus (1994), A Widow for One Year (1998), The Fourth Hand (2001), Until I Find You (2005), Last Night in Twisted River (2009), In One Person (2012), Avenue of Mysteries (2015), The Last Chairlift (2022) and Queen Esther (2025).
None of them are connected, with one late exception: Queen Esther returns to the orphanage and the doctor from The Cider House Rules, so read that one first if you want the echo. Otherwise the sensible order is by length and appetite — start with A Prayer for Owen Meany or Garp, move to The Cider House Rules, and leave the nine-hundred-page late novels until you know you are in.
Where to start with John Irving
If you have never read him
→ A Prayer for Owen Meany. The warmest way in, built around one unforgettable character, and the ending pays off everything the book has been quietly setting up for five hundred pages.
If you want the book that made him famous
→ The World According to Garp. Funnier, angrier and more violent than its reputation, and the clearest statement of what he does.
If you want the one with an argument in it
→ The Cider House Rules. An orphanage, an ether-addicted doctor and the most humane novel anyone has written about abortion. He adapted it himself and won an Oscar for it.
If you have read the big three
→ Last Night in Twisted River or In One Person. The first is the best of the late novels; the second is the most personal.
If it is the Dickensian shape you want more of
→ My best fiction books of all time list has the other big, plotted, character-crowded novels that work the same way.
Frequently asked questions about John Irving's books
Where should I start with John Irving's books?
Most readers start with A Prayer for Owen Meany (1989) or The World According to Garp (1978). Owen Meany is the warmest and most accessible entry, driven by one unforgettable character and an ending that pays off completely; Garp is the book that made him famous and shows the comedy and the catastrophe at full strength. The Cider House Rules (1985) is the best choice if you want the Dickensian, socially engaged Irving. Save the nine-hundred-page late novels until you know you like him.
Which John Irving novels were made into films?
Five, though one is disguised. The World According to Garp (1982, with Robin Williams), The Hotel New Hampshire (1984, with Jodie Foster and Rob Lowe), Simon Birch (1998), which is drawn loosely from A Prayer for Owen Meany — Irving insisted the title and character names be changed because the film departs so far from the book — The Cider House Rules (1999), and The Door in the Floor (2004), adapted from roughly the first third of A Widow for One Year.
Did John Irving win an Oscar?
Yes. He won the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay at the 72nd Academy Awards in March 2000, for the 1999 film of The Cider House Rules. He adapted his own 1985 novel, a process that took about thirteen years and four directors and which he wrote about in My Movie Business (1999). The film was also nominated for Best Picture, and Michael Caine won Best Supporting Actor.
Is it true John Irving writes the last sentence first?
Yes, and he is consistent about it: “I never begin a novel until I've written that last sentence.” He works out the ending, then the final chapter, then plots backwards to the opening, drafting in longhand before typing. He credits twenty years of competitive wrestling for the discipline it takes, and says it is why his plots feel so tightly built despite their length.
What is John Irving's newest book?
Queen Esther, published in November 2025 — his sixteenth novel. It returns to Dr. Wilbur Larch and the St. Cloud's orphanage of The Cider House Rules, following Esther Nacht, a Vienna-born Jewish girl taken in by a New England family, from her birth in 1905 to Jerusalem in 1981. His previous novel was The Last Chairlift (2022).
“I never begin a novel until I've written that last sentence.”
John Irving, on his method, which has not changed in sixteen novels. If this shelf interested you, the full bookshelf has more: reading lists by theme, author guides, and notes on what is actually worth your time.
Browse the full bookshelf Get book recommendations