Unless Carol Shields by Carol Shields 9780679311805, 0679311807 instant download after payment.

Carol Shields explores the bonds between mothers and daughters, husbands and wives, and what happens when abstract ideas are put to the test.

Reta Winters has a loving family, good friends, and growing success as a writer of light fiction. Then her eldest daughter suddenly withdraws from the world, abandoning university to sit on a street corner, wearing a sign that reads only ‘Goodness’. As Reta seeks the causes of her daughter’s retreat, her enquiry turns into an unflinching, often funny, meditation on society and the places where we find meaning and hope. 

"Like The Stone Diaries and its tour-de-force follow-up novel, Larry's Party, Unless presents itself, almost insistently, as a story about ordinary lives. But then, through her sensitive observation and exacting prose, the author proceeds to flip them over and show us their uncommon depths."   -  Washington Post Book World 

"…poignant, yet often astringently funny….as ever, Shields' graceful prose is a pleasure to read. She has a remarkable way of describing things one might already know, but she does so in surprising, fresh and distinctly new ways, ways that allow the reader to understand something anew."  -  Winnipeg Free Press

Carol Shields has published six novels and two collections of short stories.  Mary Swann was her first novel to first to be published in the UK in 1990, followed by Happenstance (1991) and The Republic of Love (1992). The Stone Diaries was short-listed for the 1993 Booker Prize and won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1995. In 1997 her novel Larry’s Party won the UK’s coveted Orange Prize for Women’s Fiction. Her last novel, Unless, was published in the UK in 2002 and was shortlisted for the Orange Prize.