In One Person: A Novel Audiobook

Quotes

• “In One Person gives a lot. It’s funny, as you would expect. It’s risky in what it exposes…Tolerance, in a John Irving novel, is not about anything goes. It’s what happens when we face our own desires honestly, whether we act on them or not.”

  — New York Times Book Review

• “Irving has a frightening command of the various ways people sickened during those dark days [of AIDS], and he dramatizes one death after another with such extraordinary compassion that the victims and their families step out from the fog of statistics and take their place as separate tragedies, every one…There’s a talent at work in this brave new novel that—as Prospero said—‘frees all faults.’”

  — Washington Post

• “It is impossible to imagine the American—or international—literary landscape without John Irving…He has sold tens of millions of copies of his books, books that have earned descriptions like epic and extraordinary and controversial and sexually brave. And yet, unlike so many writers in the contemporary canon, he manages to write books that are both critically acclaimed and beloved for their sheer readability. He is as close as one gets to a contemporary Dickens in the scope of his celebrity and the level of his achievement.”

  — Time

• “In One Person is a rich and absorbing book, even beautiful, and probably the most different book of Irving’s long career…Thirty years ago, Billy would have been so different as to be dangerous…From now on, the truly deviant will be the ones—the scowling churchmen and reprobates who cast everyone into hell—who cease to live their own lives while telling everybody else how to live theirs.”

  — Esquire

• “In One Person finds Irving energized and engaged, employing his familiar motifs and strategies to excellent effect. His compassion and belief in tolerance shine through…The chapters set during the height of the AIDS epidemic are especially strong and honest.”

  — San Francisco Chronicle

• “In speaking for tolerance and acceptance…this novel is on the side of the angels…‘Fullness of heart,’ a quality Irving has praised in Dickens, is one of its many virtues, and the reader is swept along by the histories it tells…John Irving understands plotting as few other living American writers do.”

  — New York Review of Books

• “The prose devoted to AIDS victims is particularly devastating…The passages in which Billy visits various dying classmates, friends, and lovers at home and in hospitals include some of Irving’s best writing, ever.”

  — Boston Globe

• “His prose, as always, is gorgeous, and Irving remains a master builder when it comes to constructing an epic plot filled with satisfying twists.”

  — Entertainment Weekly

• “[Irving] never abandon[s] his core subject: the individual’s right to respect, regardless of sex or gender orientation…There is no American writer of that era [1970s] who deserves more to be reread and reconsidered than John Irving…He is daringly feminist, to a degree that his sex-positive contemporaries (Roth and the late Updike) never considered…At any age, in any decade, these are thoughts that test the conscience and the heart…the fear of the death of children—or of anyone you love…thoughts that Irving has made a career of wrestling to the mat, not worrying about whether they can be pinned.”

  — Daily Beast

• “A brave and hugely affecting depiction of how in one life (sexual or otherwise) we contain multitudes.”

  — Elle

• “Truly heart-wrenching. Irving cares deeply, and the novel is not just Bill’s story but a human tale. This wonderful blend of thought-provoking, well-constructed, and meaningful writing is what one has come to expect of Irving.”

  — Library Journal

• “Although sexual desire in its many and varied permutations is thoroughly explored, it is the humanity of the characters that shines through at the end.”

  — Seattle Times

• “Irving’s ability to humanize his unconventional characters is nowhere put to better use than in this novel.”

  — Philadelphia Inquirer

• “An admirable undertaking, evoking the spirit of his literary hero, Charles Dickens, to examine a serious social issue without losing sight of the truth that those ultimate questions are rooted in the everyday world of living, breathing people.”

  — Minneapolis Star-Tribune

• “In One Person tackles questions of identity and sexual politics with the straightforward style and explicit honesty Irving fans know well.”

  — Toronto Star

• “A sexual comedy that has both guts and heart…Irving commonly wages war on the bigot, the prude, and the bully, but seldom with such effusive brio as in his thirteenth novel…A hard novel to classify but an easy one to like—much like its protagonists. In the enchanted woods of Vermont, Rilke’s angels and Shakespeare’s sprites cast spells that conjure dreams of a love without limits.”

  — Independent (London)

• “It is to Irving’s great credit that, as a bestselling heterosexual American novelist, he has written what those who indeed put labels on things might call a ‘gay novel’ without treating homosexuality as an ‘issue’…In One Person is boldly conceived and energetically executed.”

  — Spectator (London)