"From one of the world's most critically acclaimed and beloved writers comes a big-hearted and intricately crafted novel about purpose, belonging, and the lengths we will go to find ourselves. Thomas and Constance Winslow of Pennacook, New Hampshire are the quiet iconoclasts of their tidy New England town, their subtle rebellions against stodgy, churchgoing conformity the perennial subject of the townspeople's inconsequential murmuring. That is, until their adoption of a precocious fourteen-year-old Jewish girl from the quietly infamous orphanage in St. Cloud's to serve as an au pair to their youngest daughter, Honor, gives the townspeople of Pennacook something to talk about. ... Two decades later, amid the outbreak of the Second World War, the fiercely self-reliant Jewish au pair, Esther Natch, is in Europe fighting Nazis, but still devoted to Honor, and to a special arrangement between the two of them: Esther will be the surrogate biological mother of a child that Honor and the Winslow family will raise as their own. True to her word and better, in 1941 Esther gives birth to James "Jimmy" Winslow, who quickly becomes the apple of the Winslow family's eye. In 1963, Jimmy is twenty-two and determined to be a fiction writer. His studies take him to Vienna, where he spends an eventful year, during which his mother Honor is determined to secure him a draft deferment by any means--whether by physical injury or by "knocking someone up." In Vienna and the years that follow, the mysterious activities of Jimmy's Jewish birthmother Esther and her covert, globetrotting activities remain a poignant throughline in Jimmy's life, leading to a revelatory journey to conflict-torn Jerusalem in 1981. A triumphant return to the literary universe of John Irving's beloved, landmark novel The Cider House Rules, Queen Esther is a touching, timely, and propulsive masterwork from one of the most accomplished novelists of the last century."-- Provided by publisher.