Carol Shields

"Nothing short of astonishing." - New Yorker "A thing of beauty-lucidly written, artfully ordered, riddled with riddles and undergirded with dark layers of philosophical meditations." - Los Angeles Times The final book from Pulitzer Prize-winning author Carol Shields, Unless, is a harrowing but ultimately consoling story of one family's anguish and healing, proving Shields's mastery of extraordinary fiction about ordinary life. For all of...

A comedy on the rise of a nobody. It happens to Larry Weller, a Winnipeg floral designer who goes for his honeymoon to England. The couple visit Hampton Court with its shrubs and Weller discovers his vocation, becoming a famous maze builder.

"[This is] the story of a woman dancing on the edge of a difficult life. Ever since her husband left her -- seemingly vanishing into thin air -- Charleen Forrest has supported herself and her fifteen-year-old son on what she earns as an obscure poet and part-time gofer for an even more obscure scientific journal. But when her estranged mother remarries -- prompting an unplanned reunion -- Charleen finds herself moving out of her familiar existence."--Page...

On the surface Judith Gill, the protagonist, is a nobody, a middle-class housewife with two children living in a small town. But her job as a biographer has taught her it is the little things in life that count, and from that point of view her story is alive with action. By the author of The Stone Diaries, for which she won the 1995 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

Two stories from a marriage in crisis: thewife's story and the husband's story. The setting issuburbia, the time frame a week spent apart. She goes toa quilting convention where she has an affair, he stayshome to mind the kids and discuss manhood with a friendwho has been abandoned by his wife.

Rhyming text follows six little wombats on walkabout and a hungry dingo following, envisioning them as his lunch until the wombats turn the tables on him.

A group of Martians looking for life on the different planets in the solar system make a surprising discovery just as they are about to give up.

The author gives a tip of the hat to B.B. King in an ode to the blues and babyhood.