Unless - Carol Shields

Joining a book club has led me to read literature that would not usually be my first choice. This has led to some interesting reads as well as some that are best forgotten. This is a book that I had not heard of but if I had seen it in a book-shop I may well have selected it anyway as the "blurb" sounded interesting. --The Author-- Carol Shields was an American born Canadian. Her novel Stone Diaries is probably her most famous work and it won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1993. Unless was her last novel and it was written whilst she was fighting breast cancer and unfortunately she died shortly after it was published. This novel ...  Read the complete review

I had already read and enjoyed three novels by Carol Shields – Larry´s Party, The Box Garden and A Celibate Season – so when I saw Unless advertised on amazon I was intrigued. Yet, I din´t buy the book at once, the discrepancy between a synopsis I found and the piccie on the cover put me off, cover designers have a responsibility, if they only knew! For those who like their synopses short (from the net): ´44-year-old Reta Winters, wife, mother, homemaker, writer and translator lives a perfect life until her eldest daughter, 19-year-old Norah, drops out of university, abandons her boyfriend and family to sit mute and cross-legged on a Toronto street corner ...  Read the complete review

Reta Winters (pronounced Ree-tah) is a 43 year old fiction writer and the mother of three daughters. She lives in Ontario, Canada with her almost husband Tom (they aren?t actually married), with two of their daughters Natalie (15) and Christine (16). Norah, who is 19, does not live at home. She sits cross-legged on a Toronto street corner beneath a lamp post, beside a begging bowl. She wears a cardboard sign on her chest with a single word printed on it ? GOODNESS. Reta has a new idea for a book. It will be about lost children, and goodness, and everyone being ...  Read the complete review