A Prayer for Owen Meany

Front Cover
Knopf Canada, May 1, 2001 - Fiction - 656 pages

“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 was 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 and terrifying.

 

Contents

Section 1
3
Section 2
13
Section 3
15
Section 4
18
Section 5
23
Section 6
26
Section 7
39
Section 8
56
Section 22
272
Section 23
287
Section 24
332
Section 25
343
Section 26
347
Section 27
369
Section 28
388
Section 29
402

Section 9
70
Section 10
91
Section 11
97
Section 12
109
Section 13
110
Section 14
120
Section 15
150
Section 16
155
Section 17
163
Section 18
169
Section 19
205
Section 20
226
Section 21
260
Section 30
423
Section 31
427
Section 32
500
Section 33
519
Section 34
534
Section 35
595
Section 36
627
Section 37
629
Section 38
631
Section 39
632
Section 40
637
Copyright

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About the author (2001)

JOHN IRVING was born in Exeter, New Hampshire, in 1942. His first novel, Setting Free the Bears, was published in 1968, when he was twenty-six. He competed as a wrestler for twenty years, and coached wrestling until he was forty-seven. Irving has been nominated for a National Book Award three times, winning in 1980 for The World According to Garp. In 2000, he won the Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay for The Cider House Rules. In 2013, he won a Lambda Literary Award for In One Person. An international writer, his books have been translated into more than thirty-five languages. A Prayer for Owen Meany is his best-selling novel, in every language. A dual citizen of the United States and Canada, John Irving lives in Toronto.

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