Last Night in Twisted River

John Irving

In 1954, in the cookhouse of a logging and sawmill settlement in northern New Hampshire, an anxious twelve-year-old boy mistakes the local constable's girlfriend for a bear. Both the twelve-year-old and his father become fugitives, forced to run from Coos County--to Boston, to southern Vermont, to Toronto--pursued by the implacable constable. Their lone protector is a fiercely libertarian logger, once a river driver, who befriends them.In a story spanning five decades, Last Night in Twisted River--John Irving's twelfth novel--depicts the recent half-century in the United States as "a living replica of Coos County, where lethal hatreds were generally permitted to run their course." From the novel's taut opening sentence--"The young Canadian, who could not have been more than fifteen, had hesitated too long"--to its elegiac final chapter, Last Night in Twisted River is written with the...

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