Novelist John Irving says he knew he was on track when he figured out how “Queen Esther” would end. Now he faced a new challenge: How the story began.

“Like all my novels, that’s the thing I see most clearly or I don’t begin,” Irving says on a recent video call from his home in Toronto. “A timeline begins that is instigated by the end.

“If that’s where it ends, and who these characters are, well, where does it begin? How old were they then?” he says. “I’m making my way back.”

Novelist John Irving in the Muslim Quarter of the Old City in Jerusalem, on the Via Dolorosa, the Way of Sorrows, where Christ carried the cross to be crucified. “There was no ATM machine in 1981, and probably not when the Romans built the Old City,” Irving says. He traveled to Jerusalem in July 2024 on a fina

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