A Prayer for Owen Meany: A Novel

Front Cover
Ballantine Books, 1997 - Fiction - 543 pages
Owen Meany, a latter-day prophet and Christ-like figure dies a martyr after having inspired true Christian belief in the narrator, Johnny Wheelwright. The boys grow up close friends in a small New Hampshire town, where Owen's loutish parents own a quarry and where the fatherless Johnny, whose beloved mother never reveals the secret of his paternity, becomes an orphan at age 11 when a foul ball hit by Owen in a Little League game strikes his mother on the head, killing her instantly. The tragedy notwithstanding, Owen and Johnny cleave to a friendship sealed when Owen uses desperate means to keep Johnny from going to Vietnam, and brought to its apotheosis when Johnny is present at the death Owen has seen prefigured in a vision.
 

Selected pages

Contents

THE ARMADILLO
43
THE ANGEL
92
THE LITTLE LORD JESUS
137
THE GHOST OF THE FUTURE
184
THE VOICE
231
Copyright

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About the author (1997)

John Irving has been nominated for a National Book Award three times–winning once, in 1980, for the novelThe World According to Garp. A Prayer for Owen Meany was published in 1989. In 1992, Mr. Irving was inducted into the National Wrestling Hall of Fame in Stillwater, Oklahoma. In 2000, he won the Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay forThe Cider House Rules –a film with seven Academy Award nominations.

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