A late book by a prolific novelist is often an echo chamber – to the evident enjoyment of the author and potentially also the longtime reader. But in Queen Esther, the sixteenth novel by the 83-year-old John Irving, the reverberations from the American-Canadian author’s early work sometimes threaten to deafen.

Much of the novel is set in Vienna, the location of his debut, Setting Free the Bears (1968). The title character, Esther Nacht, has suffered grievous parental loss, a status Irving (himself adopted) has already dispensed prolifically, including to the baptismal protagonist of A Prayer for Owen Meany (1989) and to many of the cast of The Cider House Rules (1985), featuring the St Cloud’s orphanage in Maine.

Esther’s son, Jimmy Winslow, becomes a novelist – at least the eighth Irving character to do so, from the unnamed narrator of The 158-Pound Marriage (1974) through T S Garp in The World According to Garp (1978) and Ruth Cole in A Widow for One Year (1998) to Juan Diego