Until I Find You

This sprawling, profane, and ultimately uplifting novel is a high-water mark by the bestselling author of THE WORLD ACCORDING TO GARP and THE CIDER HOUSE RULES. Poor Jack Burns, portrayed here with amazing dexterity by narrator Arthur Morey, takes the listener on a lifelong search for his tattoo-covered, church-organ-playing, young-girl-seducing father, a journey that is a fateful and sometimes harrowing roller-coaster ride. Morey not only captures the tone and rhythm of Irving's prose, he mimics the author's vocal tone and, even more remarkably, gently ages the character from age 4 to adulthood. Morey's rich and breathy delivery makes the hilarious deadpan humor soar and the devastating, sad episodes even more poignant. R.O. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award (c) AudioFile 2005, Portland, Maine

June 6, 2005
Actor Jack Burns seeks a sense of identity and father figures while accommodating a host of overbearing and elaborately dysfunctional women in Irving's latest sprawling novel (after The Fourth Hand
). At the novel's onset (in 1969), four-year-old Jack is dragged by his mother, Alice, a Toronto-based tattoo artist, on a year-long search throughout northern Europe for William Burns, Jack's runaway father, a church organist and "ink addict." Back in Toronto, Alice enrolls Jack at the all-girls school St. Hilda's, where she mistakenly thinks he'll be "safe among the girls"; he later transfers to Redding, an all-boy's prep school in Maine. Jack survives a childhood remarkable for its relentless onslaught of sexual molestation at the hands of older girls and women to become a world-famous actor and Academy Award–winning screenwriter. Eventually, he retraces his childhood steps across Europe, in search of the truth about his father—a quest that also emerges as a journey toward normalcy. Though the incessant, graphic sexual abuse becomes gratuitous, Irving handles the novel's less seedy elements superbly: the earthy camaraderie of the tattoo parlors, the Hollywood glitz, Jack's developing emotional authenticity, his discovery of a half-sister and a moving reunion with his father. Agent, Janet Turnbull Irving.