Avenue of Mysteries was published by Simon & Schuster in 2015, and it returns to the territory of A Prayer for Owen Meany — the intersection of fate, faith, and free will — in a novel that alternates between two timelines: Juan Diego Guerrero’s childhood in the dump community of Oaxaca, Mexico (where he lived with his clairvoyant sister Lupe), and his present-day journey through the Philippines as an aging novelist.
The “avenue of mysteries” is a real street in Oaxaca — but it is also the path that fate or providence (or coincidence) traces through a human life. Juan Diego, like Owen Meany before him, seems to exist within a pattern that is larger than his individual choices: his sister’s prophecies come true, events seem arranged by an intelligence beyond human understanding, and the question of whether this pattern is meaningful (God) or meaningless (chance) is the novel’s deepest concern.
Irving draws on his own travels in Mexico and the Philippines to create settings of vivid specificity, and the novel’s engagement with Catholicism (both Mexican and Filipino) provides a framework for its metaphysical questions that is culturally grounded rather than abstractly philosophical.
Collecting Avenue of Mysteries
First edition (Simon & Schuster, New York, 2015): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition in dust jacket: $8–$20
- Signed first edition: $30–$80
- Without jacket: $3–$8