“Unless you’re lucky, unless you’re healthy, fertile, unless you’re loved and fed, unless you’re offered what others are offered, you go down in the darkness, down to despair.”Reta Winters has many reasons to be happy: Her three almost grown daughters. Her twenty-year relationship with their father. Her work translating the larger-than-life French intellectual and feminist Danielle Westerman. Her modest success with a novel of her own, and the clamour of her American publi...

Carol Shields, the Pulitzer Prize-winner author of the novels Unless*,* The Stone Diaries and Larry’s Party was also a renowned short story writer. Now readers can enjoy all three of Carol Shields’s short story collections – Various Miracles, The Orange Fish and Dressing Up for the Carnival – in one volume, along with the previously unpublished story, “Segue,” her last.With an eye ...

These two unique novels tell the stories of Jack and Brenda Bowman during a rare weekend apart in their many years of marriage. Jack is at home coping with domestic crises and two uncouth adolescents, while immobilized by self-doubt and questioning his worth as a historian. Brenda, travelling alone for the first time, is in a strange city grappling with an array of emotions and toying with the idea of an affair. Intimate and insightful yet never sentimental, Happenstance is a prof...

This book has the unusual format of containing two books in one: from front to back reads "The Wife's story" and from back to front "The Husband's story." The latter was written first, but the two are written such that either can be read first. The wife, Brenda Bowman, is a housewife who has recently gained commercial success and cultural renown as a quiltmaker. As the novel opens, she is leaving her Chicago home to attend a quiltmaker's conference in Philadelphia. Over the course of a wee...

Carol Shields's award-winning and critically acclaimed "literary mystery," first published in 1987.Swann is the story of four individuals who become entwined in the life of Mary Swann, a rural Canadian poet whose authentic and unique voice is discovered only hours before her husband hacks her to pieces.Who is Mary Swann? And how could she have produced these works of genius in almost complete isolation? Mysteriously, all traces of Swann's existence — her notebook, the firs...

The Stone Diaries marked a new phase in a literary career already ablaze with achievement. As well as the many international awards it received, including the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Governor General's Award, the book also met with universal critical acclaim and topped bestseller lists around the world. "Carol Shields," raved Maclean's, "has crafted a small miracle of a novel." "The Stone Diaries," said the New York Time...

What are those life experiences that catch us by surprise, that haven't ever been part of our discussions or readings because they lie beyond the limit of words or the courage and will to articulate? When Carol Shields and Marjorie Anderson began asking other women - friends, colleagues, family members - what experiences had amazed them, disappointed them, caught them unprepared, the responses were immediate. Many women reacted as though this question was something they had been waiting to...

With a viewpoint that shifts as crisply as cards in the hands of a blackjack dealer, we are introduced to two shell-shocked veterans of the wars of the heart. There is Fay, a folklorist whose passion for mermaids has kept her from focusing on any one man. And right across the street there’s Tom, a popular radio talk-show host who has focused a little too intently, having married and divorced three times. Only Carol Shields could describe so adroitly this couple who fall in love as thorough...

With the same sensitivity and artfulness that are the trademarks of her award-winning novels, Carol Shields explores the life of a writer whose own novels have engaged and delighted readers for the past two hundred years. In Jane Austen, Shields follows this superb and beloved novelist from her early family life in Steventown to her later years in Bath, her broken engagement, and her intense relationship with her sister Cassandra. She reveals both the very private woman an...

In the sequel to Roughing It in the Bush, Susanna Moodie portrays the relatively sophisticated society springing up in the clearings along Lake Ontario. During a trip from Belleville to Niagara Falls, Moodie acts as a meticulous observer of the social customs and practices of the times.Invaluable as social history and as a candid self-portrait, Life in the Clearings versus the Bush chronicles, with wit and wisdom, Canadian society in the mid-19th century.T...

Until events run wildly out of hand, Charleen Forrest manages to cope with the uncertainties of a failed marriage, trying to live her own life and raise a son on her frugal income. She is not unaware of the hazards: "family, banktellers, ex-husband, landladies, bus drivers... men on the make who want her to lie back and accept (this is what you need, baby), friends who feel sorry for her." Her resourcefulness is a delight; her uncanny observations and surprising irony reveal a witty, wry e...

Winner of the Governor General’s Literary Award and the Pulitzer Prize, and Shortlisted for the Booker PrizeBorn in 1905, Daisy Goodwill Flett drifts through the chapters of childhood, marriage, widowhood, remarriage, motherhood, and old age, bewildered by her inability to understand her own role in the unsettled decades of the twentieth century. At last, reflecting on her unobserved and unconventional life, Daisy attempts to find a way to tell her story within a n...