Preview of A Son of the Circus Summary:

At over six hundred pages, A Son of the Circus is a huge book, as if Irving wanted to pack into it something about all of the themes he has addressed in his previous novels. This is a book about religion: about how Christians and Parsis and Muslims cope with the problem of good and evil; how followers of these religions come to their faith; how cultural practices and prejudices arise from different religious views; how the religious person fulfills social responsibility by caring for those who need love and aid. For example, the novel's main character, Dr. Farrokh Darawalla, born a Parsi and descended, therefore, from the Zoroastrians who came to India in the seventh and eighth centuries to escape Muslim persecution, rejects both his Parsi background and his father's atheism. He converts to Christianity when he interprets a bite on his toe...