Queen Esther (2025)

[Simon]

   

Indigo’s Best Books of 2025
After forty years, John Irving returns to the world of his bestselling classic novel and Academy Award winner The Cider House Rules, revisiting the orphanage in St. Cloud's, Maine, where Dr. Larch takes in Esther, a three-year-old Jew whose life is shaped by anti-Semitism.

Esther Nacht is born in Vienna in 1905. Her father dies on board a ship from Bremerhaven to Portland, Maine, and anti-Semites murder her mother in Portland. In St. Cloud’s, it’s clear to Dr. Larch, the orphanage physician and director, that the abandoned child not only knows she’s Jewish, but she’s familiar with the biblical Queen Esther she was named for. Dr. Larch knows it won’t be easy to find a Jewish family to adopt Esther, he doubts he'll find any family to adopt her.

When Esther is fourteen, soon to become a ward of the state, Dr. Larch meets the Winslows, a philanthropic family with a history of providing for unadopted orphans. The Winslows aren’t Jewish, but they detest anti-Semitism and similar prejudice. Esther’s gratitude to the Winslows is unending. As she retraces her steps to her birth city, Esther keeps loving and protecting the Winslows—even in Vienna.

The final chapter of this historical novel is set in Jerusalem in 1981, when Esther is seventy-six.
John Irving’s sixteenth novel is a testament to his enduring ability to weave complex characters and intricate narratives that challenge and captivate. Queen Esther is not just a story of survival but a profound exploration of identity, belonging, and the enduring impact of history on our personal lives showcasing why Irving remains one of the world’s most beloved, provocative, and entertaining authors—a storyteller of our time and for all time.

In his heyday, John Irving gave us The World According to Garp and The Cider House Rules. This late-career novel revisits the setting of the latter, although not in a way so substantial that it could count as a prequel. We begin in St Cloud’s orphanage in Maine, decades before the events of The Cider House Rules, with Dr Wilbur Larch struggling to find a family to adopt a Jewish teenager, Esther. The blue-blooded Winslows step up to the plate, but, as Gentiles, worry they won’t be able to help Esther discover her Jewish identity. A fascinating plotline that takes Esther to Palestine and membership of Haganah is, sadly, not followed through, as Irving shifts to focus on her son Jimmy, whose coming-of-age dominates the narrative until Esther crops up as an old woman by way of epilogue. Queen Esther isn’t as complete a novel as you’d hope. It does feel like a wasted opportunity to explore a strong character who becomes immersed in Zionism, and the Bildungsroman that overtakes Esther’s story, while streaked with characteristic humour, does deflate into predictability in terms of the author’s preoccupations. One of Irving’s lesser works, best read for completeness.