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Avenue of Mysteries

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What to expect

Brought to you by Penguin.

Juan Diego’s little sister is a mind reader. As a teenager, he struggles to keep anything secret – Lupe knows all the worst things that go through his mind. And sometimes she knows more. What a terrible burden it is to know – or to think you know – your future, or worse, the future of someone you love. What might a young girl be driven to do if she thought she had the power to change what lies ahead?

Later in life, Juan Diego embarks on a journey to fulfil a promise he made in his youth. It is a long story and it has long awaited an ending, but Juan Diego is unable to write the final chapters.

This is the story of what happens when the future collides with the past.

© John Irving 2016 (P) Penguin Audio 2016

Critics Review

From the first page to the last, there is a goodness to this novel, a tenacious belief in love and the redemptive power of human connection, unfettered by institutions and conventions. This belief, combined with good old-fashioned storytelling, is surely why Irving is so often described as Dickensian. But John Irving is his own thing, and so is his new novel. Avenue of Mysteries is thoroughly modern, accessibly brainy, hilariously eccentric and beautifully human.
New York Times Book Review
Irving has packed so much detail in . . . And yet he has not run out of what has endeared him to so many for so long: immense charm, an appetite to hurtle headlong at the biggest questions and the altogether unfashionable belief that sentimentality is not a crime against art
Guardian
Mischievous . . . Challenging and absorbing . . . Juan Diego emerges as one of Irving’s most memorable and fascinating creations, which is saying something. He is a twenty-first century Garp.
Herald
Irving has embarked on his dark phase, as did Dickens. It will be interesting, if melancholy, to follow him down that gloomy avenue
The Times
A typically idiosyncratic Irving novel: at times exhausting, at other times rambling and self-indulgent, but always readable, impassioned and thought-provoking
Mail on Sunday
Grabs you by the throat in a way few other authors’ work can
Daily Mail
Irving’s powers of storytelling – when to give knowledge and when to withhold it, then smack you in the face with it – remain intact
Telegraph
Author John Irving
Narrator Armando Durán
Duration 20 hours and 51 minutes
Release Date
ISBN 9781473540347
Format Audiobook
Publisher Transworld
Genre Modern and contemporary fiction
Availability AU, GB, IE

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