Queen Esther

A novel

By: John Irving

Narrated by: Ari Fliakos

Indigo’s Best Books of 2025

After forty years, John Irving returns to the world of his bestselling classic novel and Academy Award winner The Cider House Rules, revisiting the orphanage in St. Cloud's, Maine, where Dr. Larch takes in Esther, a three-year-old Jew whose life is shaped by anti-Semitism.

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

When Esther is fourteen, soon to become a ward of the state, Dr. Larch meets the Winslows, a philanthropic family with a history of providing for unadopted orphans. The Winslows aren’t Jewish, but they detest anti-Semitism and similar prejudice. Esther’s gratitude to the Winslows is unending. As she retraces her steps to her birth city, Esther keeps loving and protecting the Winslows—even in Vienna.

The final chapter of this historical novel is set in Jerusalem in 1981, when Esther is seventy-six.

Critic reviews

Indigo’s Best Books of 2025

“I needed this dose of old-school New England decency. Few skewer sanctimony quite like Irving at his best. More important: I fell in love, once again, with his people. . . . Irving’s championing of alternative families is not only welcome but necessary—especially these days in a post-Dobbs United States. Irving’s championing of alternative families is not only welcome but necessary . . . let 2026 be the year of an Irving revival. Of course, he’s never gone away . . . but we may need his singular sense of compassion now more than ever.” —The New York Times