A Prayer for Owen Meany: A Novel
Description
“A remarkable novel. . . . A Prayer for Owen Meany is a rare creation. ... An amazingly brave piece of work ... so extraordinary, so original, and so enriching. . . . Readers will come to the end feeling sorry to leave [this] richly textured and carefully wrought world.” —STEPHEN KING, Washington Post
I am doomed to remember a boy with a wrecked voice—not because of his voice, or because he was the smallest person I ever knew, or even because he was the instrument of my mother's death, but because he is the reason I believe in God; I am a Christian because of Owen Meany.
In the summer of 1953, two eleven-year-old boys—best friends—are playing in a Little League baseball game in Gravesend, New Hampshire. One of the boys hits a foul ball that kills the other boy's mother. The boy who hits the ball doesn't believe in accidents; Owen Meany, one of literary fiction’s most unforgettable characters, believes he is God's instrument. What happens to Owen after that 1953 foul ball is extraordinary.
A PBS Great American Read Top 100 Pick
|I am doomed to remember a boy with a wrecked voice—not because of his voice, or because he was the smallest person I ever knew, or even because he was the instrument of my mother's death, but because he is the reason I believe in God; I am a Christian because of Owen Meany.
In the summer of 1953, two eleven-year-old boys—best friends—are playing in a Little League baseball game in Gravesend, New Hampshire. One of the boys hits a foul ball that kills the other boy's mother. The boy who hits the ball doesn't believe in accidents; Owen Meany believes he is God's instrument. What happens to Owen after that 1953 foul ball is extraordinary.
|“A remarkable novel. . . . A Prayer for Owen Meany is a rare creation in the somehow exhausted world of late twentieth-century fiction—it is an amazingly brave piece of work . . . so extraordinary, so original, and so enriching. . . . Readers will come to the end feeling sorry to leave [this] richly textured and carefully wrought world.” - STEPHEN KING, Washington Post
“Exhilarating and darkly comic. ... Dickensian in scope. ... Stunning.” - Los Angeles Times Book Review
“The magic of A Prayer for Owen Meany is that it forces us into a confrontation with our own carapaces of skepticism . . . It is a brave and subtly disturbing affirmation of faith, and it is all the more remarkable for its engagement with the deepest questions, the most painful mysteries of our lives.” - Los Angeles Times
“Brilliantly cinematic . . . Irving shows considerable skill as scene after scene mounts to its moving climax. - ALFRED KAZIN, New York Times
"[A] great novel." - Dallas Morning News
"A work of genius." - Independent (London)
"A heartbreaking masterpiece of a novel." - Sunday Express (London)
"Among the very best American novels of our time." - Charlotte Observer
PUBLISHER:
HarperCollins
ISBN-10:
0062204092
ISBN-13:
9780062204097
BINDING:
Paperback / softback
PUBLICATION YEAR:
2012
NUMBER OF PAGES:
656
BOOK DIMENSIONS:
8.00(H) x 5.31(W) x 1.05(D)
AUDIENCE TYPE:
General / adult
LANGUAGE:
English