Novelist John Irving says he knew he was on track when he figured out how “Queen Esther” would end. Now he faced a new challenge: How the story began.

“Like all my novels, that’s the thing I see most clearly or I don’t begin,” Irving says on a recent video call from his home in Toronto. “A timeline begins that is instigated by the end.

“If that’s where it ends, and who these characters are, well, where does it begin? How old were they then?” he says. “I’m making my way back.”

In writing “Queen Esther,” Irving found sparks of inspiration in his real life and in the fictional themes and settings he’s long been drawn to explore.

Esther Nacht is a Jewish child born in Vienna in 1905 and orphaned as a child of 3 in Maine. As a teen, she works as a nanny for a New Hampshire family’s you

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