In the summer of 1953, two eleven-year-old boys-best friends-are playing in a Little League baseball game in Gravesend, New Hampshire. One of the boys hits a foul bay and kills the other boy's mother. The boy who hits the ball doesn't believe in accidents; Owen Meany believes he is God's instrument. What happens to Owen, after that 1953 foul ball, is extraordinary and terrifying. "John Irving, who writes novels in the unglamorous but effective way Babe Ruth used to hit home runs, deserves a medal not only for writing this book but for the way he has written it..A Prayer for Owen Meany is a rare creation in the somehow exhausted world of late twentieth-century fiction-it is an amazingly brave piece of work.so extraordinary, so original, and so enriching.readers will come to the end feeling sorry to leave [this] richly textured and carefully wrought world." - Stephen King