Last month I walked through the Toronto scenes in John Irving’s novel, A PRAYER FOR OWEN MEANY. Later, I was in touch with John . To be precise, I introduced him at a Toronto event where he talked revealingly about writing, and adjusting to the changes in his life created by the success of THE WORLD ACCORDING TO GARTH. It was fascinating.

In the course of all this I learned about an Irving novel that I had somehow missed, LAST NIGHT IN TWISTED RIVER. It came out in 2009. It begins in New Hampshire on a wild river drive, with logs swirling downstream topped by nimble loggers : “The young Canadian, who could not have been more than fifteen, had hesitated too long. For a frozen moment, his feet had stopped moving on the floating logs in the basin above the river bend; he’d slipped entirely underwater before anyone could grab his outstretched hand…..”

That tragic death among the “river drivers” begins this book, in Coos County, New Hampshire, in 1954. For five decades we follow a mean and murderous cop who is determined to track down two men, a father and son, that he wants to kill. They change their names and flee, but he stays on their trail. They flee to Boston in 1967, to Windham County, Vermont, in 1983, then to Toronto, in 2000.

In Toronto they settle in Rosedale, on Cluny Avenue, while the aged father works in a restaurant nearby. The son, meanwhile, has become a novelist, and he writes in a room with a view north to the historic railway tower that now marks the Summerhill Liquor Store, outside which so many of my readers wait, panting, as the sun rises. Rosedale is an interesting bit player in the book, as is the restaurant where the father plies his trade, behind the scenes.

Then, after a return to New Hampshire, in 2005, the last section of the book takes us to Georgian Bay. Pointe au Baril Station is the setting, and we learn from the descriptions of the roads on land and the islands out in the Bay, that John (a regular summer visitor) knows the area well. My hardcover edition is graced by a back cover photo of John, taken by one of his children, on the rocks beside what is clearly Georgian Bay.

So this is only partly a book that you can walk through. Swimming through it is also an option.