The Mercedes Variation lyrically chronicles Paul's infatuation with his rural neighbour Mercedes. She `stepped from her truck scrubbed, fresh and vibrant. Her eyes sent sparks as she smiled. She'd twined a chain of daisies through her ebony black hair and her nipples played hide and seek behind the delicate lace of her blouse. The wind wrapped her skirt around her more tightly than a mummy. She had open leather sandals on her feet. She looked like a virgin gypsy. I was dazzled.’

The background explores the uneasy mingling of hippies into the established rural culture of Ontario in the nineteen eighties, but the theme is a personal struggle.

Paul not only discovers natural rhythms but, from the hippies, or `beansprouters', as the locals called them, he observes other values.

`Profit wasn't a dirty word and yet, no one priced their skill higher than another's. Jobs were done cooperatively, or bartered, and at less than commercial rates. In that way they all sustained their dreams.'

The Mercedes Variation is a carefully woven tapestry.

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Chris Banner, the Author, was raised on the edge of the Cotswold Hills in the west of England.

Years later as the publisher and editor of a rural newspaper in Eastern Ontario, he recorded the decay of an established rural society. Inspired by Laurie Lee's Cider with Rosie, these circumstances became the background for his love story, `The Mercedes Variation’.

Chris Banner has an extensive career as a journalist and writer. He was a regular contributor to the Ottawa Citizen, a regular free lance writer for several Maclean Hunter magazines, and Publisher and Editor of The Lanark Era, one of Canada’s oldest weekly newspapers. He also co-owned and founded `Anthos’, an eastern Ontario Arts journal.

He moved to Canada’s west coast in the 1980’s and became a reporter and columnist. He edited and photographed for `On The Waterfront’ a monthly maritime journal, later edited `Coastal Echoes’, an environmental journal and regularly contributed to `Cosmic Debris’ a Vancouver Island Music magazine. He has also contributed political commentary to the Victoria Times Colonist and `Impact’ magazine in Florida.

He was a finalist in the British Columbia Writer’s Festival Competition and his short story `Flight’ was published by Laughing Willow Books in `The Air Between Us’ – ISBN 0-9698975-0-2.