It is said that most of your books start with how you envision the ending. Is that how Queen Esther came about, too?

My novels wait a long time before I begin to write them. And this is because, as a part of my ending-driven process, I like to work my way back from where I know the story should end. In this case, I always knew that I wanted to write an empathetic history of one of those European-born Jews who will become a Zionist and be part of the founding of the state of Israel. I wanted to give her a history, a childhood where her life has already been shaped by anti-Semitism. It was my hope, even for those readers who are opposed to Israel and Zionism, that they could understand in the trajectory of this story why Esther would be a Zionist and dedicate herself to being the best Jew she could be.

I always knew it would end in Jerusalem in 1981. That was the first and most informative time I was there and much of my pro-Israel feeling was born then. I travel with a notebook. I was writing things down. Whatever was happening there then made me feel that this conflict was eternal. And I thought that moment in time was a formative and informative place in history for a novel to end.

Did your recent visit to Israel [Irving went back for additional research in July 2024] in the middle of the conflict change your positive feelings towards the state?

No. I think Israel is always better in the hands of a left-wing Prime Minister. My politics has always been aligned more with the Left than with the Right. I am not confident of the present ceasefire because it is brokered by Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu. I’m pro-Israel, but not pro-Netanyahu. And in the case of this novel, for the first time ever, I declined to go to my birth country, the US, to promote it, because of the authoritarian, fascist, imperialist p** in the White House. Not to put too fine a point on it.

Topical issues like abortion, immigration, and trans rights often figure in your books. Do you have a political point to make on these issues?

It’s no surprise to me that the later half of my oeuvre is more political, as my own political awareness has become higher over the years. But I am a child of the protest generation. I was of an age to be influenced by the civil rights movement, the gay rights movement, and certainly by the protests against the Vietnam War, which caused deaths or irrevocable changes in many of my friends. Not only was I affected by the protests of my generation, I was also a part of them.

Going back further, my mother was a nurse’s aide. Her principal job was to advise young, unmarried, and pregnant women and girls, both before the Roe v. Wade judgment [where the US Supreme Court upheld the right of pregnant women to abortion] and after it. My mother’s role was to help them at a time when abortion was illegal and unsafe. Even after it became safe and legal, it wasn’t easy. So, my mother would often be angry at the circumstances in which these young women and girls found themselves. She couldn’t help but sound off when she came back home from work.

My younger brother and sister, boy-girl twins, were gay. I have seen how much they would be persecuted, hated, or even made to feel that they should hate themselves. So, at an early age, I became an ally of women’s rights, abortion rights, gay rights.

Queen Esther is Irving’s 16th novel. | Photo Credit: By special arrangement

You have written so many bestselling novels. Is there a pressure with every new novel to match the heights of the previous ones, or do you just get on with it?

You have to respect what your audience thinks are their favourite books, but you can’t keep writing those books. I’m certainly aware that certain locations, landscapes, and dysfunctional family situations are repeated in many of my books. I repeat certain autobiographical things. So there are areas where my novels overlap themselves, which my readers will recognise too. But the new novel I’m writing is always driven by its own story.

Do you think you will revisit the worlds of previous novels in future works too as you have done in Queen Esther by returning to Dr Larch and The Cider House Rules?

No. Dr Larch [a central character who is an obstetrician and an abortion facilitator] was fortuitous, or simply lucky circumstance. I needed a place for an orphan. Because of my story’s timeline, I thought, wait a minute, I know an orphanage, I know a guy, and he would make every effort to find out as much about Esther as he could.

A still from the screen adaptation of The Cider House Rules. | Photo Credit: By special arrangement 

I have to ask you about A Son of the Circus (1994), which, of course, is set in India. How familiar were you with India when you wrote that book?

It’s one of those several novels that began as a screenplay which never got made. I rewrote it as a novel. As a writer who has adapted a novel into a film, I can tell you that it’s much easier to write the screenplay first and then let it get bigger than it is to write a long and complicated novel and suddenly think, “Oh, god, the action has to be compressed into two hours. What do I have to lose?”

I spent a lot of time with a director and Indian friends in the film world. We travelled for a long time with the Great Royal Circus in Gujarat. There was a film board or a process that denied us the right to make the film in India because the theme of underage aerialists performing without a net was considered critical of India. This board said, you can’t make this film that reflects badly on us. You’re foreigners. By then, I had a cast of characters who were Indian.

When we moved the film to Mexico, where there are also children aerialists performing without a net, I did not want to lose the characters I had met, and those characters were all Indians. I couldn’t just pick them up and take them to Mexico. My attachment to India was also connected to my friendship with Salman Rushdie, who had introduced me to so many people, and with whom I was going to be in India when I was working for [the film]. But he could no longer go, it would not have been safe for him. A Son of the Circus is dedicated to Salman, and he was an early reader.

Aerialists perform at Bingo Circus in Visakhapatnam in January 2026. | Photo Credit: K.R. DEEPAK

Your novels often run for over 500 pages. Do you worry that people today might not be able to sit through long novels?

When you’re writing a historical novel, you have to be true to the time and place. And a part of my passion for the 19th century novel involves the way in which the passage of time is so often a part of their stories. It’s hard to imagine that I will ever lose my interest in the passage of time as a function of storytelling.

What are you working on next?

It begins in London during the Second World War, where the characters are all connected to the Norwegian government-in-exile. The novel is called What The Twins Would Remember.