Used book – The Fourth Hand, John Irving, Josée Kamoun

Patrick Wallingford has a dream: he is lying on a dock on an emerald green lake and a woman with a sensual voice, whom he hears but does not see, suggests they remove their wet bathing suits. This is because he is under the influence of a powerful painkiller, administered after a lion swallowed his left hand during a report on a circus in India...

With his droll wit, John Irving tells us the story of the encounter between this transplant candidate, a brilliant surgeon saved from anorexia by his young marathon-running maid, an ambitious yuppie, a gum-chewing makeup artist, and finally a siren dressed in a green sweatshirt, in a tale about loss and recovery, which leads a stunted teenager to manhood – to fatherhood – through the attraction of a magnetic being and place.

And what if the author were trying to prove to us that the strength of desire is the most magical of prosthetics?

Translated from English (United States) by Josée Kamoun