Until I Find You was published by Random House in 2005, Irving’s longest novel at over 800 pages. Jack Burns grows up believing that his mother Alice took him through the cities of northern Europe (Amsterdam, Copenhagen, Helsinki, Edinburgh) in search of his father William Burns — a church organist and tattoo enthusiast who abandoned the family. But Jack’s childhood memories, it emerges, are unreliable: Alice was not searching for William but fleeing from him, and the trip had purposes that the child Jack could not understand.
The novel’s central concern is the unreliability of childhood memory — how children construct narratives about their own lives that may bear little relationship to what actually happened, and how these false narratives shape adult identity. Jack becomes an actor (a professional inhabiter of false identities) and a man who cannot trust his own past — because the story he was told about his childhood turns out to have been his mother’s fiction rather than his own experience.
Irving uses the novel’s European settings (tattoo parlors, churches, red-light districts) with characteristic richness, and the theme of the absent father resonates with his earlier work. But the novel’s length and its second-half revelation (that everything Jack believed about his childhood was wrong) divided critics: some found the reversal brilliant, others felt it undermined the reader’s investment in the first half.
Collecting Until I Find You
First edition (Random House, New York, 2005): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition in dust jacket: $10–$25
- Signed first edition: $40–$100
- Without jacket: $3–$8