Unicycle Press leather edition of John Irving's "A Widow for One Year," a First edition, Frontispiece illustration by Paula Ziegenhagen-Slick, Personally SIGNED by JOHN IRVING, Limited to 1200 copies, this one being 1071, published in 1998. Bound in hunter green leather, the book has decorative paper end leaves, Symth-sewn binding, and printed on acid-free paper---in FINE condition.  John Winslow Irving, who was born in 1942 as John Wallace Blunt, is an American novelist and screenwriter. He grew up in Exeter, New Hampshire, where he was a student athlete in the wrestling program. "A Widow for One Year" opens with: “One night when she was four and sleeping in the bottom bunk of her bunk bed, Ruth Cole woke to the sound of lovemaking—it was coming from her parents’ bedroom.” The setting is Long Island, in the summer of 1958. When Ruth entered her parents' bedroom she saw the naked young man who had mounted her mother from behind; he was holding her mother's breasts in his hands and humping her on all four, like a dog . . .the four-year old did not know that she was witnessing a sexual act---nor did the young man and her mother's activity strike Ruth as entirely unpleasant.  Marion, Ruth's mother, liked sitting on Eddie, "riding him" she called it because she liked seeing his face. . .Marion at thirty-nine was astonished that a sixteen-year-old boy was capable of an astonishing number of repeat performances in a remarkably short period of time. "Don't you need time to . . .recover?" Marion and her husband, Minty Cole, a highly successful children's author and sometimes teacher at EXETER ACADEMY, were the parents of two teen-aged sons who died, and four-year-old Ruth was conceived to help the parents overcome their grief. The second window into Ruth’s life opens on the fall of 1990, when she is an unmarried woman whose personal life is not nearly as successful as her literary career. She distrusts her judgment in men, for good reason.  The novel closes in the autumn of 1995, when Ruth Cole is a forty-one-year-old widow and mother. She’s about to fall in love for the first time. Richly comic, as well as deeply disturbing, A Widow for One Year is a multilayered love story of astonishing emotional force. Both ribald and erotic, it is also a brilliant novel about the passage of time and the relentlessness of grief. 537 pages.  I offer combined shipping.