Queen EstherQueen Esther

After 40 years, John Irving revisits the setting of his classic novel, The Cider House Rules --the orphanage in St. Cloud's, Maine, where a Jewish girl, not yet four, is abandoned one winter night.

Esther Nacht is born in Vienna in 1905. Her father dies on board a ship from Bremerhaven to Portland, Maine; anti-Semites murder her mother in Portland. In the orphanage at St. Cloud's, it's clear to Dr. Larch that the abandoned child not only knows she's Jewish; 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 won't find any family who'll adopt her.

When Esther is fourteen, about to become a ward of the state, Dr. Larch meets the Winslows--a philanthropic family with a history of providing foster care for unadopted orphans. The Winslows aren't Jewish, but they detest anti-Semitism and like-minded prejudice. Esther's gratitude to the Winslows is unending. While she retraces her steps to her birth city, Esther never stops loving and protecting the Winslows--not even in Vienna.

In the final chapter of this historical novel--set in Jerusalem, in 1981--Esther Nacht is seventy-six.