Poignant and wryly humorous, an unsparing chronicle of small-town lives,The Age of Longing is Richard B. Wright's finest novel. Brilliantly written, tinged with irony and shot through with a self-deprecating honesty, it ranks with the best of our fiction.

Ross, 'Buddy' Wheeler, father of Howard, never won the Stanley Cup. Called up from a small-town farm team, he saw his moment of fame skate by in a fleeting four-game stint with the 1930's Montreal Maroons. Grace Wheeler, mother of Howard and tight-lipped teacher, could never abide Buddy's carousing and the childish games he insisted on pursuing.

Howard, now firmly entrenched in middle age and the survivor of both a coronary and his parents' failed dreams, needs to understand what has happened in order to cast a net around his own scattered fragments of longing and loss.