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Genre: Historical Fiction, Contemporary Fiction In the summer of 1953 in Gravesend, New Hampshire, 11-year-old Owen Meany—an exceptionally tiny boy with a high-pitched, damaged voice rendered in the novel in all-caps—hits a foul ball during a Little League game that tragically kills his best friend John Wheelwright's mother. Owen refuses to view the tragedy as a random accident; instead, he is utterly convinced that he is an instrument of God with a predetermined, divine destiny. The story is narrated retrospectively in 1987 by an adult John Wheelwright living in Canada. It shifts back and forth between the 1950s/1960s New Hampshire childhood and the late-1980s present, tracking their education, political awakening during the Vietnam War, and Owen's premonition of his own heroic, sacrificial death.