A Prayer for Owen Meany - Large Print by John Irving (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

"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 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

From the Back Cover

I am doomed to remember a boy with a wrecked voice--not because of his voice, or because he was the smallest personI ever knew, or even because he was the instrument of my mother'sdeath, 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 theother boy's mother. The boy who hits the ball doesn't believe inaccidents; Owen Meany believes he is God's instrument. Whathappens to Owen, after that 1953 foul ball, is extraordinary.

Review Quotes

"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