Quirky, bizarre, tragic; fiendishly funny, The Hotel New Hampshire is anything but a conventional family saga, though a family saga it certainly is. The Berry family are different. Love abounds -both healthy and incestuous. It is the overwhelming desire of the Berry father to run a hotel, which he does, with dubious success, in both a former girls’ school in New Hampshire, and in Vienna.

It is the Berry children who grab the "readers’ attention, sympathies and love - all five of them: Frank (the eldest), Franny (the weirdest),John (the narrator), Lily (the writer) and Egg (the youngest). When Irving, or rather John, writes ’Frank’s queer, Franny’s weird, Lily’ssmall and Egg is Egg’ the initiated reader can do no other than shout a deafening ’yes, I know what you meant’

John Irving was born in Exeter, New Hampshire, in 1942, and he once admitted that he was a ’grim’ child. Although he excelled in English at school and knew by the time he graduated that he wanted to write novels, it was not until he met a young Southern novelist named John Yount, at the University of New Hampshire, that he received encouragement. ’It was so simple,’ he remembers. ’Yount was the first person to point out that anything I did except writing was going to be vaguely unsatisfying.’

In 1963, Irving enrolled at the Institute of European Studies in Vienna,and he later worked as a university lecturer. His first novel, Setting Free the Bears, about a plot to release all the animals from the Vienna Zoo, was followed by The Water-Method Man, a comic tale of a man with a urinary complaint, and The 158-Pound Marriage, which exposes the complications of spouse-swapping. Irving achieved international recognition with The World According to Garp, which he hoped would ’cause a few smiles among the tough-minded and break a few softer hearts’.

The Hotel New Hampshire is a startlingly original family saga, and The Cider House Rules is the story of Doctor Wilbur Larch - saint,obstetrician, founder of an orphanage, ether addict and abortionist and of his favourite orphan, Homer Wells, who is never adopted. A Prayer for Owen Meany features the most unforgettable character Irving has yet created. A Son of the Circus is an extraordinary evocation of modern day India. John Irving’s latest and most ambitious novels are A Widow for One Year and The Fourth Hand.A collection of John Iving’s shorter writing, Trying to Save Piggy Sneed, was published in 1993. Irving has also written the screenplays for The Cider House Rules and A Son of the Circus, and wrote about his experiences in the world of movies in his memoir My Movie Business.

Irving has had a life-long passion for wrestling, and he plays a wrestling referee in the film of The World According to Garp. In his memoir, The Imaginary Girlfriend, John Irving writes about his life as a wrestler, a novelist and as a wrestling coach. He now writes fulltime, has three children and lives in Vermont and Toronto.

1. The Bear Called State O’Maine

2. The First Hotel New Hampshire

3. Iowa Bob’s Winning Season

4. Franny Loses a Fight

5. Merry Christmas, 1956

6. Father Hears from Freud

7. Sorrow Strikes Again

8. Sorrow Floats

9. The Second Hotel New Hampshire

10. A Night at the Opera: Schlagobers and Blood

11. Being in Love with Franny; Dealing with Chipper Dove

12. The King of Mice Syndrome; the Last Hotel New Hampshire