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‘Her perceptions are so quick, her style is so acute, that she can tack a breath to the page and skewer a thought on the wing. It is her speciality to isolate moments that remain distinct in the mind for years, perhaps for a lifetime.’ Hilary Mantel, Sunday Times
‘Shields is about the best we have, she does not just express what oft was thought; she snags the shadows of those thoughts, the thoughts we did not know we had. The effect – at once elating and visceral – feels like a conjurer pulling a handkerchief from your heart.’ Daily Telegraph
Lorelei King reappears as sole narrator of the novel which won a coveted gold at last week's Spoken Word Publishers' Association awards, the audio Oscars. The book is Unless (HarperCollins £12.99), the last to be written by the late Carol Shields. Its narrator has three teenage daughters, the oldest of whom has taken to begging on a street-corner. By the end we know why. Nothing else, to speak of, happens. Yet these few hours of listening offer an intensity of distilled wisdom. Strung out on the tension of dread, Shields writes – and King reads – with consummate discretion, profundity, humour and elegant precision about ambition, family and the desperation of helpless love – though such clunking terms do little justice to this chiselled masterpiece of anguish and appreciation. Suffice to say that you just might lend this audio to your very best friend. But you will certainly fret until you get it back. Audiobooks: By Sue Gaisford 28 September 2003.
Product Description
The dazzling novel from Carol Shields, author of The Stone Diaries (winner of the Pulitzer prize) and Larry’s Party (winner of the Orange prize).
All her life, it seems to Reta Winters, she has enjoyed the useful monotony of happiness. She has a loving husband, three bright daughters and supportive friends, and is experiencing growing success as a writer and translator. Then her eldest daughter suddenly withdraws from the world, abandoning university, family and loving boyfriend to sit on a street corner, uncommunicative but for a sign around her neck bearing one word, 'GOODNESS'. The anguish of her loss leads Reta into a desperate search for the causes of her daughter's retreat. No obvious explanation appears to fit. As Reta casts her net ever wider her enquiry turns into an unflinching, often very funny examination of our society and the reasons a young woman might conclude it has no place for her.
Warmth, passion and wisdom come together in this journey through the life of an unforgettable woman. Shields' remarkably supple prose yields insights and images of transcendent beauty and acuity from the stuff of small-town life. At once the discomfiting, ultimately consoling story of one family's loss and a searing portrait of life at the dawn of the twenty-first century, UNLESS is a dazzling and daring novel from the undisputed master of extraordinary fictions about so-called 'ordinary' lives.
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