Queen Esther

Available from Nook & Cranny Books when we last checked. Sold from the shop’s own store; the price there is the one that counts.

After forty years, John Irving returns to the world of his bestselling classic novel and Academy Award–winning film, The Cider House Rules , revisiting the orphanage in St. Cloud’s, Maine, where Dr. Wilbur Larch takes in Esther—a Viennese-born Jew whose life is shaped by anti-Semitism. Esther Nacht is born in Vienna in 1905. Her father dies on board the ship to Portland, Maine; her mother is murdered by anti-Semites in Portland. Dr. Larch knows it won’t be easy to find a Jewish family to adopt E