In 1954, in the cookhouse of a logging and sawmill settlement in northern New Hampshire, an anxious twelve-year-old boy mistakes the local constable`s girlfriend for a bear. Both the twelve-year-old and his father become fugitives, forced to run from Coos County - to Boston, to southern Vermont, to Toronto - pursued by the implacable constable. Their lone protector is a fiercely libertarian logger, once a river driver, who befriends them. In a story spanning five decades, Last Night in Twisted River - John Irving`s twelfth novel - depicts the recent half-century in the United States as `a living replica of Coos County, where lethal hatreds were generally permitted to run their course`. From the novel`s taut opening sentence - `The young Canadian, who could not have been more than fifteen, had hesitated too long` - to its elegiac final chapter, Last Night in Twisted River is written with the historical authenticity and emotional authority of The Cider House Rules and A Prayer for Owen Meany. It is also as violent and disturbing a story as John Irving`s breakthrough bestseller, The World According to Garp. What further distinguishes Last Night in Twisted River is the author`s unmistakable voice - the inimitable voice of an accomplished storyteller. Near the end of this moving novel, John Irving writes: `We don`t always have a choice how we get to know one another. Sometimes, people fall into our lives cleanly - as if out of the sky, or as if there were a direct flight from Heaven to Earth - the same sudden way we lose people, who once seemed they would always be part of our lives`.