This is outstanding. Original, periodically and bleakly funny, deeply sad and yet ultimately hopeful, I don't even care that it's the size of a brick and I had to prop it up on a pillow to read because its gargantuan hardback self was too heavy to hold up for hours at a time.

I think what impresses me most here is that despite the potential for melodrama this never really goes over the top - mostly because every single one of the characters who is worth anything (either as a person or as a narrative driver) is fundamentally decent. Two eleven year old boys are best friends, and when one of them, during a baseball game, hits a ball that accidentally kills the mother of the other, their relationship - and the relationships of everyone around them - stays solid. It's a clear accident, and the temptation for any other writer would have been to plunge that friendship into a push-pull of ambiguity and liking and resentment, yet it never happens.

Owen, the boy who hits the ball, is such a fascinating character. Humourless, dictatorial, deeply religious, and yet capable of both extraordinary goodness and extraordinary friendship, he's the most entertaining character I've read for ages. (His manipulation of the Christmas pageants had me cackling with laughter.) His best friend John, the orphaned and perennial Joseph, is, if not quite as compelling, possibly the best narrator Owen could have had. And the way their stories come together, how they build up to that awful ending that could not have been anything else... it's so clever, and so affecting.

This is only the second book of Irving's that I've read. The other was The World According to Garp, which had flashes of genius but which was, overall, fairly average, I thought. It did, however, give the sense (through those flashes) that something incredible was going to come from the author one day. And it has, and I'm so glad to have read it.