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Find out moreCarol Shields was born and grew up in Oak Park, a suburb of Chicago. She was the third child of a sweet-factory manager and a schoolteacher.
After Hanover College, Indiana, she won a place on an exchange programme with Exeter University. There she found a more academic atmosphere, in which she thrived, and a Canadian engineering graduate student, whom she subsequently married.
Over the next ten years or so she moved around Canada with her husband, had five children, came back to England (Manchester) for three years, and wrote the occasional short story. Age twenty-nine, she wrote seven poems for a Canadian Broadcasting Corporation Young Writers' Competition – and won. There followed a period of poetry writing, a master's programme in English at the University of Ottawa, a thesis on Susanna Moodie, a 19th-century Canadian fiction writer and two books of poetry, Others and Intersect. The week she turned forty her first novel Small Ceremonies, was published, her thesis was accepted for publication, and she was about to leave for a year in France during her husband's sabbatical. There she immediately started her second novel, The Box Garden.
She published two collections of short stories as well as six novels. Mary Swann was the first to be published in the UK in 1990, followed by Happenstance, which combined two earlier novels published separately, in 1991 and The Republic of Love in 1992. The Stone Diaries was published in August 1993, and was short-listed for the Booker Prize. It is now a bestselling paperback, and won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in April 1995. Various Miracles, a collection of short stories, was published to critical rapture in November 1994, and her first two novels, Small Ceremonies and The Box Garden, saw their first UK publication in February and June 1995 respectively.
In August 1997 her novel Larry's Party was published by Fourth Estate, and went on to win the UK's coveted Orange Prize for Women's Fiction in May 1998. A new collection of short fiction, Dressing Up for the Carnival, was published in February 2000. Her last novel, Unless, was published in the UK in 2002 by Fourth Estate and went on to be shortlisted for both the Orange Prize and the Booker Prize.
Carol Shields passed away in July 2003.
A beautifully written book about a mother, Reta, struggling to cope with her eldest daughter’s decision to make herself homeless, choosing to live on the street and beg for money for charity. We follow Reta’s unravelling emotions through the relationships with the rest of her family and also through the new novel she is writing. This is not all doom and gloom, there are some laugh out loud moments but it is also a look at women and how they fit in to society today. Some interesting topics of discussion in this book so tell your book club to get reading.
Mary Swann, a latter-day Emily Dickinson, submitted a paper bag of poems to newspaper editor Frederic Cruzzi mere hours before her husband hacked her to pieces. How could someone who led such a dull, sheltered life produce these works of genius? Four very different people search for the elusive answer.
This won the Orange Prize for fiction back in 1997. We follow Larry through the maze (a subject on which he becomes very astute) of his life, his relationships, his work, physical changes – all is laid bare. A great novel told with surprising insight and clarity. A "Piece of Passion" from the publisher... Detailing the life of landscape designer Larry Weller from the late seventies through to the late nineties, this is a brilliant and hilarious insight into just how much the concept of ‘being a man’ has changed over such a short period of time. Seamlessly weaving together different episodes in Larry’s (seemingly very ordinary) life, in Larry’s Party Carol Shields excels in making the mundane seem magnificent. Spellbindingly intricate, completely original and sometimes ingeniously funny, this Orange Prize winning novel is a genuine modern classic.
Ein vielschichtiger, mit bissigem Humor geschriebener Roman uber den Literaturbetrieb und uber menschliche Wahrnehmungen und Wunschprojektionen von Pulitzer-Preistragerin Carol ShieldsMary Swann, eine Buerin, wird von ihrem Mann ermordet. Sie hinterlt eine Tte voller groartiger Gedichte. Wer war diese Frau? Wie kam sie dazu als einfache Frau solch vollendete Lyrik zu verfassen? Ein Symposium soll das Geheimnis lften, doch pltzlich verschwinden Mary Swanns Spuren ... "e;Einer der besten Romane, die ich in diesem Jahr gelesen habe - subtil, witzig, ergreifend, voller berraschungen und wunderschn komponiert."e; Margaret Atwood
First published in Carol Shields's acclaimed collection Dressing Up for the Carnival. A couple's life is thrown into utter chaos when The National Association of Metereorologists go on strike - what will they wear? What will they eat?First published in Carol Shields's acclaimed collection Dressing Up for the Carnival. A couple's life is thrown into utter chaos when The National Association of Metereorologists go on strike - what will they wear? What will they eat?
A couple buy a print to adorn their living room, but little do they know the power of their purchase.Fast Fiction: A selection of masterful short stories from 4th Estate short story collections, and the best talent from The Sunday Times authors, available to purchase as single story ebooks.Fast Fiction: A selection of masterful short stories from 4th Estate short story collections, and the best talent from The Sunday Times authors, available to purchase as single story ebooks.
Miracles do happen - but what is their significance?Fast Fiction: A selection of masterful short stories from 4th Estate short story collections, and the best talent from The Sunday Times authors, available to purchase as single story ebooks.
For all of her days, Reta Winters has enjoyed the useful monotony of happiness: a loving family, good friends, growing success as a writer of light fiction, novels 'for summertime.' This placid existence cracks open one fearful day when her beloved oldest daughter, Norah, drops out of life to sit on a gritty street corner, silent but for the sign around her neck that reads 'GOODNESS.' Reta's search for what drove her daughter to such a desperate statement turns into an unflinching and surprisingly funny meditation on where we find meaning and hope.Warmth, passion and wisdom come together in Carol Shields' remarkably supple prose. Unless, a harrowing but ultimately consoling story of one family's anguish and healing, proves her mastery of extraordinary fictions about ordinary life.
For the first time all of Carol Shields' remarkable short stories - some previously unpublished - are gathered together in one volume. `Carol Shields' stories have given me happiness, not just pleasure' Alice Munro In the Collected Stories we bring together Carol Shields' original short-story volumes, Various Miracles, The Orange Fish and Dressing Up for the Carnival, as well as many stories not previously published in the UK, including `Segue', her last work. In these stories the author combines the dazzling virtuosity and wise maturity that won so many readers to her prize-winning novels such as The Stone Diaries and Unless.
Orange Prize and Pulitzer Prize-winning Carol Shields' tender, funny and wonderfully insightful portrait of two sisters struggling to rediscover themselves amidst the perplexing swirl of family life. Judith is a biographer whose life is subsumed by others: her eccentric husband, her secretive children and the Victorian novelist who is her subject. Her sister Charleen is a single mother and lapsed poet. While Judith analyses the minutiae of lives past and present, Charleen battles her own past ghosts and wonders desperately what her life has been about. As their mother's wedding approaches, both sisters must come to terms with the paths they have chosen. Originally published as two companion novels: Small Ceremonies and The Box Garden.
A beautifully written book about a mother, Reta, struggling to cope with her eldest daughter’s decision to make herself homeless, choosing to live on the street and beg for money for charity. We follow Reta’s unravelling emotions through the relationships with the rest of her family and also through the new novel she is writing. This is not all doom and gloom, there are some laugh out loud moments but it is also a look at women and how they fit in to society today. Some interesting topics of discussion in this book so tell your book club to get reading.
Bestselling novelist with an enormous critical reputation takes on one of the most popular and enduring English novelists of all. The prizewinning novelist Carol Shields, whose novels have themselves been compared to the works of Jane Austen, gives us a beautifully written, perceptive look at the life of one of the finest and most popular English novelists of all time. Jane Austen spent the first 25 years of her life in Steventon and the last eight in nearby Chawton, and did most of her writing in these two places. She never married although many of her novels are about marriage, and always lived with her parents and sister Cassandra. Whilst not unaware of the larger political and social goings-on at the time, she chose a small canvas for her novels, preferring to focus on the family as a microcosm through which to explore human nature. Carol Shields has written a wonderfully observant and revealing biography of this remarkable writer whose characters are as alive today as they were two hundred years ago, when Jane Austen first gave them breath. 'An excellent biography' Mail on Sunday
` The Republic of Love marries a wide diversity of elements, mythical and modern, ironic and moving, exhilarating and melancholy...a love-surveying story that is enticingly seductive.' Times Literary Supplement ` The Republic of Love is a hymn to the pleasures and pains, the raptures even of an unspectacular life. Fay discovers that happiness is a kind of by-product of existence, and not an end in itself . This piece of knowledge saves her, Shields suggests, from the watery, ambiguous yearning of the mermaid, plaintive, coy , wordlessly calling out to no one. A simple message, but Shields delivers it with so much grace and so little pretension, that it is impossible not to be enchanted by her voice. She sings with the charm of a true siren. In her hands, we believe, anything can happen.' Guardian `A novel that's so engrossing it makes you want to retire to a squashy sofa until you reach the end. Vividly fresh...glittering and spangled with fabulous surprises.' Sunday Times
In an original collaboration two award-winning authors, Carol Shields and Blanche Howard, have written an immensely enjoyable novel which give us both sides of a story about the breakdown of traditional roles, rules and communication in a marriage. A CELIBATE SEASON is the story of a married couple, Jocelyn and Charles, (Jock and Chas) and their self-imposed separation of ten months when Jock accepts a job in a city more than three thousand miles away from her family. As breadwinner and suddenly single again Jock is confronted with local politics, loneliness and advances from the opposite sex. Meanwhile back at home, Chas, an unemployed architect, is now a single parent who has to reacquaint himself with his teenage children, Mia and Greg, learn to run a household and shift his career priorities. Throw in an attractive young housekeeper, a mother-in-law who enjoys her wine, a touch of teenage angst, some unexpected home renovations and a disastrous Christmas dinner and you have modern family life.
This won the Orange Prize for fiction back in 1997. We follow Larry through the maze (a subject on which he becomes very astute) of his life, his relationships, his work, physical changes – all is laid bare. A great novel told with surprising insight and clarity. A "Piece of Passion" from the publisher... Detailing the life of landscape designer Larry Weller from the late seventies through to the late nineties, this is a brilliant and hilarious insight into just how much the concept of ‘being a man’ has changed over such a short period of time. Seamlessly weaving together different episodes in Larry’s (seemingly very ordinary) life, in Larry’s Party Carol Shields excels in making the mundane seem magnificent. Spellbindingly intricate, completely original and sometimes ingeniously funny, this Orange Prize winning novel is a genuine modern classic.
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