It was meandering, painfully repetitive in parts, and I absolutely hated the screen play sections, but I hung in there, waiting to get back into the immediate storyline.

There were so many characters I didn’t remember which were alive and which weren’t. From the reviews it appears it could only get better. In The Last Chairlift, listeners will once more be in his thrall. A visionary voice on the subject of sexual tolerance, Irving is a bard of alternative families. John Irving has written some of the most acclaimed books of our time-among them, The World According to Garp and The Cider House Rules. In the Hotel Jerome, where he was conceived, Adam will meet some ghosts in The Last Chairlift, they aren’t the first or the last ghosts he sees. Years later, looking for answers, Adam will go to Aspen. Her son, Adam, grows up in a family that defies conventions and evades questions concerning the eventful past. Back home, in New England, Little Ray becomes a ski instructor. Little Ray, as she is called, finishes nowhere near the podium, but she manages to get pregnant.

In Aspen, Colorado, in 1941, Rachel Brewster is a slalom skier at the National Downhill and Slalom Championships. John Irving, one of the world’s greatest novelists, returns with his first novel in seven years-a ghost story, a love story, and a lifetime of sexual politics.

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