The Stone Diaries marked a new phase in a lit

erary career already ahbize with achievement.

"Carol Shields, raved Maclean s, "has crafted a

small iniracle of a novel." "The Stone Diaries,"

praised The New York Times Book Review, "re-

minds us again why literature matters." The San

Diego Tribune called The Stone Diaries"a uni-

versal study of what makes women tick." Now

Carol Shiehls has done the same for men.

Larry Weller. born in Wimfipeg in 195o, is

like a lot of people. He s never really liked his

first name:"its Larryness has always seeined an

imprisonment and a sly wink toward its most

conspicuous rhyme: ordinary... He was just one

more eitizeu of the Larry nation those barbecuers,

those volunteer firemen,those wearers of muscle

shirts." But Larry Weller is an ordinary guy made

extraordinary by his creator s perception, irony,

and tenderness. Carol Shields gives us a reso-

nant and unforgettable portrait of a man a

sensuously detailed CAT scan of this life. In epi-

sodes between 1977 and 1997 that flash bark

and forward seainlessly, Larry emerges froln a

dreamy adolescence equipped with a Floral Arts

degree h oin Red River College and journeys to

wards the millennium. Among all the paradoxes

and accidents of his existeaee, he moves through

the spontaneity of the seventies, the blind en-

chanment of the eighties, and the lean, mean

nineties, adapting to society s changing expecta-

tions of men. Shields elegant prose tunis tile

trivial into the momentous as we follow Larry

through the tribulations of two marriages and

divorces, his relationship with his parents and

their private tragedy, the lfirth of his son,the

development of his career as a landscape gar

dener, and his agonizing mid-life crisis.