"Larry Weller, born in Winnipeg in 1950, is like a lot of people. He never really liked his first name; "its Larryness has always seemed an imprisonment and a sly wink toward its most conspicuous rhyme: ordinary... He was just one more citizen 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 resonant and unforgettable portrait of a man - a sensuously detailed CAT scan of his life. In episodes between 1977 and 1997 that flash back and forward seamlessly, Larry emerges from a dreamy adolescence equipped with a Floral Arts degree from Red River College and journeys toward the millennium. Among all the paradoxes and accidents of his existence, he moves through the spontaneity of the seventies, the blind enchantment of the eighties, and the lean, mean nineties, adapting to society's changing expectations of men. Shields' elegant prose turns the 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 birth of his son, the development of his career as a landscape gardener, and his agonizing mid-life crisis. And throughout, we witness his deepening passion for garden mazes - so like life, with their teasing treachery and promise of reward. From the moment that he first recognizes the man he could be, throughout the completion of his quite, stubborn search of self, Larry's odyssey mirrors the male condition at the end of our century with targeted wit, unerring poignancy, and faultless wisdom."