In Conversation with John Irving [SOLD OUT]

Join us on November 14, 2022, at 7:00 pm at The Trail Hub for an up close and personal discussion with the inimitable John Irving as he shares with us, The Last Chairlift.

One of the world’s greatest novelists returns with his first novel in seven years—a ghost story and a love story, spanning eight decades of sexual politics.

In Aspen, Colorado, in 1941, Rachel Brewster is a slalom skier at the National Downhill and Slalom Championships. Unremembered in the competition, Little Ray, as she is called, finishes nowhere near the podium, but she manages to get pregnant. Back home, in New England, Ray becomes a ski instructor. Her son, Adam, grows up in a family that defies conventions and evades questions concerning the eventful past. Years later, looking for answers, Adam will go to Aspen. In the Hotel Jerome, where he was conceived, Adam will meet some ghosts; in The Last Chairlift, they aren’t the only ghosts he sees.

Since his first novel in 1968, JOHN IRVING has written some of the most acclaimed books of our time—among them, The World According to Garp, The Cider House Rules, A Prayer for Owen Meany, and A Widow for One Year. Time magazine describes his work as “epic and extraordinary and controversial and sexually brave.” Now Irving has written what he calls his last long novel—a family saga of seven decades, reflecting the tensions in our cultural and political landscape.

Irving has been nominated for a National Book Award three times, winning in 1980 for The World According to Garp. In 2000, he won the Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay for The Cider House Rules. In 2013, he won a Lambda Literary Award for In One Person. An international writer, his books have been translated into more than thirty-five languages. A Prayer for Owen Meany is his best-selling novel, in every language. A dual citizen of the United States and Canada, John Irving lives in Toronto. The Last Chairlift is his fifteenth novel.

“It is impossible to imagine the American—or international—literary landscape without John Irving…. He is as close as one gets to a contemporary Dickens in the scope of his celebrity and the level of his achievement.” —TIME