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Unless Author: Carol Shields Hardcover Usually ships in 24 hours Delivery is subject to warehouse availability. Shipping delays may occur if we receive more orders than stock. Our Price: $35.95 Our Sale Price: $25.16 Savings: $10.79 (30%) Ordering is 100% secure . Spend $39 or more at chapters.indigo.ca and your order ships free!. ( Details ) Dimensions: 336 Pages | Canadian Author | ISBN: 0679311793 Published: March 2002 | Published by Random House of Canada Our customers who bought this item also bought: Family Matters (2002) Book ~ Rohinton Mistry Clara Callan (2001) Book ~ Richard B. Wright In the Skin of a Lion (1996) Book ~ Michael Ondaatje The Blind Assassin (2000) Book ~ Margaret Atwood Atonement (2001) Book ~ Ian McEwan From the Publisher “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 publisher for a sequel. Then in the spring of her forty-fourth year, all the quiet satisfactions of her well-lived life disappear in a moment: her eldest daughter Norah suddenly runs from the family and ends up mute and begging on a Toronto street corner, with a hand-lettered sign reading GOODNESS around her neck. GOODNESS. With the inconceivable loss of her daughter like a lump in her throat, Reta tackles the mystery of this message. What in this world has broken Norah, and what could bring her back to the provisional safety of home? Reta’s wit is the weapon she most often brandishes as she kicks against the pricks that have brought her daughter down: Carol Shields brings us Reta’s voice in all its poignancy, outrage and droll humour. Piercing and sad, astute and evocative, full of tenderness and laughter, Unless will stand with The Stone Diaries in the canon of Carol Shields’s fiction. About the Author Born in Oak Park, Illinois in 1935, Carol Shields moved to Canada at the age of twenty-two, after studying at the University of Exeter in England and the University of Ottawa. She started publishing poetry in her thirties, and is now the author of over twenty books, including plays, poetry, essays, short fiction, novels, a work of criticism on Susanna Moodie, and a biography of Jane Austen. Her work has been translated into twenty-two languages. The Stone Diaries (1993), her fictional biography of an ordinary woman who drifts through the roles of child, wife, widow and mother, bewildered even in old age by her inability to understand her place in her own life, received overwhelmingly favourable reviews. The book won a Governor General’s Literary Award and a Pulitzer Prize, and was also shortlisted for the Booker Prize, bringing the author an international following. Another novel, Swann , was made into a film, and two more screenplays based on Shields’s books are in production. Larry’s Party , published in several countries and recently adapted into a musical stage play, won England’s Orange Prize, given to the best book by a woman writer in the English-speaking world. Shields says it was “a wonderful prize to get.” Shields’s novels are shrewdly observed portrayals of everyday middle-class life. Reviewers have praised the author for exploring such universal problems as loneliness and lost opportunities. Shields, who has lived with illness for a number of years, speaks thankfully of her own fulfilling life; a former professor of English at the University of Manitoba and chancellor of the University of Winnipeg, she now lives in Victoria with her husband, a retired engineering professor, and is the mother of five grown children. Thanks to the success of The Stone Diaries , she was able to buy a summer home in France, nicknamed “Château Pulitzer” because the many literary awards she has received have dramatically increased sales of her work around the world. Shields has spoken often of redeeming the lives of ordinary people by recording them in her works, “especially that group of women who came between the two great women’s movements. . . . I think those women’s lives were often thought of as worthless because they only kept house and played bridge. But I think they had value.” In an eloquent afterword to Dropped Threads , Shields says her own experience has taught her that life is not a mountain to be climbed, but more like a novel with a series of chapters. Author Interviews 1) Can you tell us how you became a writer? I was a word-conscious child. My terrible early efforts – by terrible, I mean derivative and unreflective – were encouraged by my teachers and parents. I loved narrative; I knew that very early. And the act of writing was for me probably the most spiritual experience in my life. It seemed only natural to write the kind of books that I wanted to read. 2) What inspired you to write this particular book? Is there a story about the writing of this novel that begs to be told? I wanted to write a novel after writing a biography and I found the voice of the novel in a short story I had previously published, “A Scarf,” in Dressing Up for the Carnival . I wanted to write in the first person after many years of writing in the third person. A friend, Winnipeg writer Jake MacDonald, convinced me during one of our many long lunches that we novelists would be able to show more "decent" people in fiction if we wrote in the first person. His theory is that the third-person voice makes us nasty and ironic and less in tune with the world. I think he’s right. I chose the voice of 44-year-old Reta Winters, a wife and mother, a writer and translator, who has suffered a grievous loss. This was the worst loss that I could conceive of: separation from a child. 3) What are you exploring in this book? I wanted the book to be about four things: men and women; writers and readers; goodness; and mothers and children. While writing it, I learned about the primacy of the mother bond, about the opaque nature of goodness, about the choices observed by a novel-maker, and about the rather vast assumptions of our gendered world. I love a quote from Middlemarch , in which Dorothea talks about "widening the skirts of light and making the struggle with darkness narrower." How heroic it is that men and women meet every day and attempt to work together despite the enormity of the difference in their power. 4) Who is your favourite character in this book, and why? I love all of the characters in this book. I always end up in this kind of thralldom to my characters. I like Reta. I like her husband. I like her daughters. I like her mother-in-law. I even like the hateful Arthur Springer because I understand him. 5) Are there any tips you would give a book club to better navigate their discussion of your book? One is (and my own bookclub came upon this by chance), it is a very good idea for someone in the group to give a reading from the book. This helps the group to focus on the language of the book. A good question for Unless might be to ask: What has this book done to reinforce my feelings, or, the reverse of that, to ruffle my sense of self-worth. Another one is to ask: Does a reader demand a sense of closure, and what does this mean? 6) What question are you never asked in interviews, but wish you were? Am I happy in my vocation? Interviewers assume that I am, and in fact this is true. I do feel fortunate to have found work in the world that I love to do – independent, creative work. 7) Has a review or profile ever changed your perspective on your work? I had a review once of The Stone Diaries that said it was “too ambitious” (a particularly Canadian thing to say). That is when I began to discount reviews as a source of self-knowledge. 8) Which authors have been most influential to your own writing? All of the authors I have ever read have influenced my writing. Alice Munro has shown us what the written word can do. She has been more than a model. Mavis Gallant has shown us what is possible in a fictional transaction. John Updike has been very important to me. Jane Austen has figured out the strategies of fiction for us and made them plain. 9) If you weren’t writing, what would you want to be doing for a living? What are some of your other passions in life? I would love to have been trained as a book-binder. I would love to be a pomologist; I am very interested in apples at the moment. Tips for your Reading Group 1) Can you tell us how you became a writer? I was a word-conscious child. My terrible early efforts – by terrible, I mean derivative and unreflective – were encouraged by my teachers and parents. I loved narrative; I knew that very early. And the act of writing was for me probably the most spiritual experience in my life. It seemed only natural to write the kind of books that I wanted to read. 2) What inspired you to write this particular book? Is there a story about the writing of this novel that begs to be told? I wanted to write a novel after writing a biography and I found the voice of the novel in a short story I had previously published, “A Scarf,” in Dressing Up for the Carnival . I wanted to write in the first person after many years of writing in the third person. A friend, Winnipeg writer Jake MacDonald, convinced me during one of our many long lunches that we novelists would be able to show more "decent" people in fiction if we wrote in the first person. His theory is that the third-person voice makes us nasty and ironic and less in tune with the world. I think he’s right. I chose the voice of 44-year-old Reta Winters, a wife and mother, a writer and translator, who has suffered a grievous loss. This was the worst loss that I could conceive of: separation from a child. 3) What are you exploring in this book? I wanted the book to be about four things: men and women; writers and readers; goodness; and mothers and children. While writing it, I learned about the primacy of the mother bond, about the opaque nature of goodness, about the choices observed by a novel-maker, and about the rather vast assumptions of our gendered world. I love a quote from Middlemarch , in which Dorothea talks about "widening the skirts of light and making the struggle with darkness narrower." How heroic it is that men and women meet every day and attempt to work together despite the enormity of the difference in their power. 4) Who is your favourite character in this book, and why? I love all of the characters in this book. I always end up in this kind of thralldom to my characters. I like Reta. I like her husband. I like her daughters. I like her mother-in-law. I even like the hateful Arthur Springer because I understand him. 5) Are there any tips you would give a book club to better navigate their discussion of your book? One is (and my own bookclub came upon this by chance), it is a very good idea for someone in the group to give a reading from the book. This helps the group to focus on the language of the book. A good question for Unless might be to ask: What has this book done to reinforce my feelings, or, the reverse of that, to ruffle my sense of self-worth. Another one is to ask: Does a reader demand a sense of closure, and what does this mean? 6) What question are you never asked in interviews, but wish you were? Am I happy in my vocation? Interviewers assume that I am, and in fact this is true. I do feel fortunate to have found work in the world that I love to do – independent, creative work. 7) Has a review or profile ever changed your perspective on your work? I had a review once of The Stone Diaries that said it was “too ambitious” (a particularly Canadian thing to say). That is when I began to discount reviews as a source of self-knowledge. 8) Which authors have been most influential to your own writing? All of the authors I have ever read have influenced my writing. Alice Munro has shown us what the written word can do. She has been more than a model. Mavis Gallant has shown us what is possible in a fictional transaction. John Updike has been very important to me. Jane Austen has figured out the strategies of fiction for us and made them plain. 9) If you weren’t writing, what would you want to be doing for a living? What are some of your other passions in life? I would love to have been trained as a book-binder. I would love to be a pomologist; I am very interested in apples at the moment. Review Quotes “The beauty of Ms. Shields’ writing is the clarity and accessibility of her words. She treats the reader as an intimate, revealing details in a sympathetic voice. . . . Ms. Shields’ book is invaluable . . .” -- New Brunswick Reader “In Unless . . ., Carol Shields’s brilliant latest novel, she explores the notion of goodness and the writing process -- and how society tries to shuffle smart uncompromising women off to the margins of life. In a lesser mortal’s hands, such a book would be an earnest snore, but Shields wields a wicked wit that hits close to the bone. Think the word “unless” implies ambivalence? This book is a sure thing.” -- Chatelaine “[Y]et another delectable investigation into human folly . . .” -- Library Journal “Brilliant, humane and deeply satisfying…. It is part of Shields’s genius that she so often offers up humour and compassion on the same plate -- sometimes spiced with a subtle political comment or two. But, I repeat, this is only a part of her genius. The true gift that she gives us is that of her enormous wisdom, a wisdom that is achingly apparent in this amazing combination of darkness and light, humour and pathos called Unless . The fact that there are no clear answers to the questions that surround the nature of goodness, happiness, sorrow, does not mean that these conditions should remain unexamined. It is examinations of this kind that enhance life itself. And who better than this author to show us where to look, what to pay attention to? What better guide than a book like Unless , and what better companion than Carol Shields?” -- Jane Urquhart, The Globe and Mail “ Unless does offer hope simply in its accomplishment, in its soothing spirit of goodness that somehow transcends both character and narrative.” -- National Post “Once again, Carol Shields takes the lives of ordinary people and exposes the human heart at its best….life in general and the lives of women in particular are viewed in Shields’ work with an elegant confluence of simplicity and complexity.” -- Times-Colonist “…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 is one of that small group of writers -- among them, Alice Munro, Richard Ford, Jayne Anne Phillips, and yes, Joan Clark -- capable of making the ordinary utterly and completely extraordinary.” -- The Calgary Herald “‘Unless’ is a signal word, curious, a warning and a sign. As this is a signal novel, profound and resonant, written with the virtuosity and understated brilliance that is distinctive to Carol Shields. Quite simply, Unless is a masterpiece. Brava! Brava!” -- The Ottawa Citizen “If writers were rivers, Shields would flow more deeply and more mysteriously than it would appear from standing on the bank.” -- Kitchener-Waterloo Record “Reading the book is like having an intimate conversation with an old friend….Funny and sad, comic and poignant all at the same time, Unless is the continuation of a conversation that has been ongoing among women for generations.” -- The Chronicle-Herald (Halifax) “Generous and inquiring of heart, muted in its palette, this is a grammar of melancholy: of a particular sadness, both domestic and worldly, that arrives unbidden and settles in…. Outrage, humour, compassion, and the elegant arcs of language that distinguish Carol Shields’s enduring body of work: these are here in spades. Complacency is absent, and anything that smells of defeat. Unless is a graceful summing-up -- a backward glance, an acknowledgement of this moment, and, finally, the truest assurance that art can give: the future starts now.” -- Bill Richardson, Georgia Straight “ Unless is a triumph; a complex and rich study of family, the illusion of happiness, the process of writing and what it means to be a woman trying to find a place in a literal and/or literary world.” -- The Edmonton Journal “A novel for the ages…. Unless is the work of a master writer at the peak of her powers…. Unless has a sense of the timeless about it, a sense that it will be read with as much eagerness 100 years from now as it will be today.” -- Vancouver Sun “From page one [Shields} commands her place as a writer capable of astounding prose and perspective….It is the kind of writing that makes one stop, take a breath, then reread.” -- The Hamilton Spectator “…moving, satisfying and unsettling all at once.” -- The Gazette (Montreal) “[W]ithout question, her most powerful novel to date. . . . [A]t once witty and acute, deeply intelligent and profoundly tender. . . . . This novel offers a tunnel into the light, into an alternate plane where the interior voice of an intelligent woman is heard, astringent, tender and clear.” -- Maclean’s “[ Unless ] is altogether engaging, thought-provoking and easily ranks among Shields’ best work.” -- The Kingston-Whig Standard “Shields shares with fellow Canadian Alice Munro not only her Ontario milieu but also a gift for psychological acuity expressed in limpid, shimmering prose.” -- Booklist "All novelists worth their fictional salt can create characters; Carol Shields creates lives...As with all her work, the lives she creates [here] are lovingly delineated, shot through with recognizable reality. The writing itself is perhaps better than ever, pellucid and knowing, as naturally paced as breathing itself, yet with images so apt they pounce off the page...Shields’ readers will encounter great poignancy and great wisdom in this book...Carol Shields remakes the world and returns it to us, with hope, grace and redeeming life." -- New York Times Book Review (US) "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 (US) " Unless is a formidable meditation on reality: it takes the vessel of fiction in its hands and hurls it to the floor. Shields’ unambiguous prose is here put to the service of her intellectual daring and the result is a book that speaks without pretension about its strange and singular subject: the relationship between women and culture, the nature of artistic endeavour, and the hostility of female truth to representations of itself...Shields has produced a very, very clever book about motherhood, honour, art, language and love. It is a lament, a punch in the face, an embrace. I want to call it a masterpiece -- but I think I’ll leave that for a man to say." -- New Statesman (UK) "....a deceptively philosophical novel that succeeds in being both disturbing and reassuring in it multiple truths....the always polite, deeply subversive Shields has managed to expose, even explode, the artifice at the heart of fiction’s conventions, those slightly dishonest, unwritten rules of which everyone is aware but which no one really mentions....Shields, in common with many North American writers, possesses that mastery of the ordinary that makes fiction breathe." -- Irish Times " Unless is an extraordinary and dangerous novel. Dangerous because, like good philosophy, it asks the most fundamental questions, questions we try to avoid in our daily lives, as we study the ’art of diversion’. There are no easy answers to those questions -- ’what is goodness? what is happiness’ -- but what makes a novelist great is the preparedness to ask them -- and Carol Shields asks them more scrupulously and elegantly than most." -- The Scotsman " Unless is a joy to read, a writer working at the top of her game, bringing a remarkable intelligence to bear on both the human and the literary condition." -- Financial Times (US) "Mothers have searched for their lost daughters in literature ever since Demeter plunged into the underworld to bring back the errant Persephone. Carol Shields’ intriguing new novel mines this rich tradition to moving effect.... Shields invents a heroine forced to discard her suspicion of feminism and tiptoe towards it, learning to ask questions about social exclusion and human justice....This is [her] most interesting novel to date." -- The Independent (UK) "...the book’s challenging structure ultimately reveals its hidden ambitions. Shields once again delivers a stunningly capacious portrait of art’s least favourite subject, an ordinary happy life." -- Time Out New York "With characteristically magical prose and meticulous observation, Shields brings to life Reta’s anguish and bewilderment with a vividness that is so moving, so deeply felt, that you linger over every exquisite word, reading it and rereading it, never wanting the page to end. It is a masterpiece -- in the most delicate miniature" -- Daily Mail (UK) "Reta Winters is a marvelously inventive character whose thought-provoking commentary on the ties between writing, love, art and family are constantly compelling in this unabashedly feminist novel. The icing on the cake is the ending, which introduces a startling but believable twist to the plight of a young woman who ’in doing nothing...has claimed everything’. The result is a landmark book." -- Publishers Weekly (US) starred "If ever a book deserved to be short-listed for the Booker, it is this one." -- Publishing News (UK) "It is part of Shields’s genius that she so often offers up humour and compassion on the same plate - sometimes spiced with a subtle political comment or two. But this...is only part of her genius. The true gift that she gives us is that of her enormous wisdom, a wisdom that is achingly apparent in this amazing combination of darkness and light, humour and pathos called UNLESS" -- Globe and Mail " Unless is, in part, a meditation on the worth of a life spent writing -- Reta Winters, its protaganist, is herself a writer...Reta’s letters are full of things Carol Shields has clearly long wanted to get off her chest and they have a real engine, energy and sparky animus to them...Read [ Unless ] for the sheer life of the last chapter wherein the conditional title is explained, but every narrative thread, this not being a comedy, is not tied up." -- The Herald (Glasgow) "Nobody better captures the comic lunacy of the quotidien...but there is no mistaking the sharp mind in the background....Shields herself must be every editor’s dream. She writes like an angel, awesome in the intelligence of her observations and never less than elegant in expressing them." -- Sunday Telegraph (UK) "Shields is probably our most intelligent and beguiling observer of the everyday drama of common existence. Unless is her most raw and intentful novel yet, centred on tragedy and loss rather than the more expected themes of marital connectedness, the delicate architecture of desire and the necessity of peace, although all these subjects have a place in this exquisite new work. The novel that Reta wants to write is ’about something happening, About characters moving against a ’there’. This is just what her creator has achieved, with a matchless sensitivity that makes you draw in your breath." -- Sunday Times (UK) " Unless is a fierce novel in which the ’f’ word, feminism, rears its head. [It] is a book that celebrates the lives and concerns of women and plumbs the pitfalls of being female but refrains from male-bashing....Reta writes loopy, funny, marvellously outraged letters that she never sends to authors and editors about their omission of women in their discussions of the ’Great Books’ or their failure to cite any women in their references....Reta Winters is a spectacular character, a loving, wise, fallible, accomplished and flawed woman who turns inside to seek the answers about her daughter that the world won’t provide." -- Rocky Mountain News (US) "Carol Shields’s latest novel [is] her most questing and perhaps most personal yet. Unless is a defence of the art of fiction, but at the same time is deeply sceptical of it. It is intellectual and philosophical, but at the same time celebrates the mundane. Only a writer with the technical skill and warm humanity of Shields is capable of holding such contradictions in the delicate and satisfying balance that she achieves here... Unless is the purest expression of her art. It is required reading." -- The Mail on Sunday (UK) "Her expertly deft touch with character and place, her sly merging of clues with cluelessness, ultimately blossom, Shields-like, in gold-minted scenes that not only answer the hard questions pointed at the heart but reward every single agonizing moment spent helplessly watching over a lost child in hope she will come home." -- Toronto Star " Unless is her angriest book to date -- a study in awakening and the belated loss of innocence." -- The Guardian (UK) "Some books come along at just the right time -- Erica Jong’s ’Fear of Flying’, Doris Lessing’s ’The Golden Notebook’ or Syvia Plath’s ’The Bell Jar’ come to mind -- capturing the exact thoughts and feelings of women at a certain moment in history. Carol Shields’ 10th novel Unless is just such a book. In Unless , now the best of her novels, Shields has illuminated not only one woman’s life, but has reflected the joys, sorrows and anger found in the lives of many women.....I love this book. It has mattered in my life in a big way that few books matter in a reader’s life. I have read it three times now and I will read it again and again, because each reading brings something new and thought-provoking, something disturbing and energizing; each time I find something else to admire in its intricate construction, its precise use of language. It speaks the truth with crystalline clarity." -- The Times-Picayune (US) "From Pulitzer-winning Carol Shields, a tale about existential disarray that’s spiked with feminist outrage and leavened with womanly wit...[Shields] maintains her claim as one of our most gifted and probing novelists." -- Kirkus (US) starred "Shields shares with fellow Canadian Alice Munro not only her Ontario milieu but also a gift for psychological acuity expressed in limpid, shimmering prose." -- Booklist (US) “Thoughtfully engaging, Shields has made Unless a true masterwork flowing with emotion, intelligence and the grace of the human condition that is able to bear personal tragedy and eventual triumph.” -- The Outreach Connection “Carol Shields’ writing is lovely to read. I just someone would sit still and let me read it to them. It sounds so right. Her characters are us, with all our small vanities and strong opinions.” -- Red Deer Advocate “Shields knows exactly what she’s doing, dropping tidbits of information at just the right moment, letting some humour peak through the pain…. Shields’s intelligence is awesome, and it comes across in effortless prose, the kind that makes you stop to read a phrase aloud and marvel at the author’s wondrous skill.” -- NOW Praise for Carol Shields “Her particular kind of humanity just dazzles me. It’s the foundation of her commitment to writing as a form of redemption, redeeming the lives of lost or vanished women.” -- Eleanor Wachtel for The Globe and Mail Praise for Dressing up for the Carnival “Not reading Shields is as much of a literary omission as overlooking Jane Austen.” -- National Post Praise for Larry’s Party “Shields has taken her place alongside such Canadian writers as Alice Munro and Margaret Atwood.” -- The Globe and Mail Praise for The Stone Diaries “ The Stone Diaries reminds us again why literature matters.” -- The New York Times Book Review “An impeccable performance … one which will fill her readers with amazed gratitude.” -- Anita Brookner Info Desk iREWARDS Program About Our Company Affiliate Opportunities Careers Contact Us Corporate Sales Gift Certificates Privacy Policy Shipping Rates Store Locations Wish List chapters.indigo.ca: books Shopping Bag | Account Centre | Wish List | Help iREWARDS Program | Corporate Sales | Store Locations All Products Books DVD Video Gifts Books Advanced Search Search Tips About this Book From the Publisher About the Author Read from the Book Author Interviews Tips for your Reading Group Review Quotes Browse Books Art and Architecture Audiobooks Biography & Memoir Business and Finance Children's Books Computers Entertainment Family and Relationships Fiction and Literature Food and Drink Health and Well Being History Home and Garden Mystery and Suspense Reference and Language Religion and Spirituality Romance Science and Nature Science Fiction and Fantasy Social and Cultural Studies Sports Travel Coles Notes . 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