Forty-four-year-old Reta Winters, wife, mother, writer, and translator, is living a happy life until one of her three daughters drops out of university to sit on a downtown street corner silent and cross-legged with a begging bowl in her lap and a placard round her neck that says "Goodness."

The final book from Pulitzer Prize-winner Carol Shields, Unless is a candid and deeply moving novel from one of the twentieth century's most accomplished and beloved authors.

For the first time all of Carol Shields' remarkable short stories -- some previously unpublished -- are gathered together in one paperback volume. In The Collected Stories we bring together Carol Shields' original short story volumesVarious Miracles, The Orange Fish and Dressing Up for the Carnival, some portions of which have never before been published in the UK. To these wonderful shorter fictions, we add a chapter from Carol Shields' last, unfinished, novel Segue, making this an essential and comprehensive overview of a brilliant writer. In all of these shorter works, Shields combines the dazzling virtuosity and wise maturity that she brought to so many readers in novels such as The Stone Diaries and Unless. With her exquisite eye for detail and her eagerness to explore the most fundamental of relationships and the wildest of coincidences, she illuminates the absurdities and miracles that grace all of our lives. Playful, charming, acutely observed and generous of spirit, this collection of stories will delight and enchant readers the world over.

All over town people are putting on their costumes; X slips into his wife’ s lace-trimmed night gown and waltzes around his bedroom; Tamara is no longer the dull clerk receptionist when she wears that yellow skirt, she evolves into a stunning creature exuding passion and vitality. In Weather 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? In Soup du Jour a young boy contemplates life, the cracks in the pavement and his mother’s soup-making.

Each story encapsulates the human spirit, its diversities, complexities and absurdities. Shields observes with compassion the carnival that goes on in each of our lives and the realities that we create for ourselves. Carol Shields’ second collection of short stories celebrates the extraordinary details that are found in ordinary, everyday lives.

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.

Judith is a biographer whose life is subsumed by others: a husband who keeps secret balls of wool in a bottom drawer, two children who share their deepest thoughts only with strangers and the Victorian novelist who is her subject. Her sister Charleen is a single mother and lapsed poet with a marvellously uncomplicated son, Seth. As Judith analyses the minutiae of past lives while striving to support those of the present, Charleen battles her own past ghosts and wonders desperately what her life has been about. When the sisters are reunited for their mothers wedding, Seth disappears in a turn of events that reveals some shocking truths.

Judith's struggle to manage the perplexing swirl of her family life is wonderfully balanced with Charleen's piercing gift of observation in this tender, funny and insightful portrait of two sisters learning to come to terms with the lives they have chosen.

Mary Swann is the story of four individuals who become entwined in the life of Mary Swann, a rural Canadian poet whose authentic and unique voice is discovered only hours before her husband brutally murders her. Who is Mary Swann? And how could she have produced these works of genius in almost complete isolation? Mysteriously, all traces of Swann's existence - her notebook, the first draft of her work, even her photograph - gradually vanish in this engrossing novel exploring the surprising afterlife of a murdered poet.

These two companion novels tell the stories of Jack and Brenda Bowman during a rare time apart in their many years of marriage. In The Husband's Story, Jack is at home coping with domestic crises and two uncouth adolescents while immobilised by self-doubt and questioning his worth as a historian. In The Wife's Story, Brenda, travelling alone for the first time, is in a strange city grappling with an array of emotions and toying with the idea of an affair.

A celebration of love in its many guises, The Republic of Love recounts the heartfelt tale of two of life's unlucky lovers: Fay, a folklorist whose passion for mermaids has kept her from focusing on any one man; and, right across the street, Tom, a popular radio talk-show host who s been through three marriages and divorces in his search for true happiness.

'Breathtaking…a masterpiece.' Geoffrey Wansell, Daily Mail

Reta Winters has a loving family, good friends, and growing success as a writer of light fiction. Then her eldest daughter suddenly withdraws from the world, abandoning university to sit on a street corner, wearing a sign that reads only 'goodness'. As Reta seeks the causes of her daughter's retreat, her enquiry turns into an unflinching, often very funny meditation on society and where we find meaning and hope. Unless is a dazzling and daring novel from the undisputed master of extraordinary fictions about so-called 'ordinary' lives.

"Altogether a cause for celebration."
ANITA BROOKNER, 'Spectator'

Larry and his naive young wife, Dorrie, spend their honeymoon in England. At Hampton Court Larry discovers a new passion. Perhaps his ever-growing obsession with mazes may help him find a way through the bewilderment deepening about him as – through twenty years and two failed marriages – he endeavours to understand his own needs. And those of friends, parents, lovers, a growing son.

In LARRY’S PARTY Carol Shields presents an ironic odyssey through the life of modern man, from the late seventies through to 1997. The mundane is made magnificent by a perception which finds the drama in life’s detail – poignant, peculiar, or simply absurd.

Through Fanny Price, the heroine of Mansfield Park, Jane Austen views the social mores of her day and contemplates human nature itself. A shy and sweet-tempered girl adopted by wealthy relations, Fanny is an outsider looking in on an unfamiliar, and often inhospitable, world. But Fanny eventually wins the affection of her benefactors, endearing herself to the Bertram family and the reader alike.

In her Introduction, Carol Shields writes, [Mansfield Park's] overriding theme is difficult to isolate, since the novel is about everything it touches upon: nurturing, steadfastness, belonging and not belonging, about fine gradations of moral persuasion, about human noise and silence, and about action and stillness.

In celebration of the fifteenth anniversary of its original publication, Carol Shields's Pulitzer Prize?winning novel is now available in a Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition
ONE OF THE MOST successful and acclaimed novels of our time, this fictionalized autobiography of Daisy Goodwill Flett is a subtle but affecting portrait of an everywoman reflecting on an unconventional life. What transforms this seemingly ordinary tale is the richness of Daisy's vividly described inner life?from her earliest memories of her adoptive mother to her awareness of impending death.

Bestselling, award-winning novelist writing about one of the most popular and enduring English novelists - recently voted best author of all time. 'Splendid ... a gem' LITERARY REVIEW 'An excellent biography' MAIL ON SUNDAY 'Shields on Austen offers up a delicious prospect. And we are not disappointed' SCOTSMAN Jane Austen was one of the world's most remarkable writers, whose characters are as alive today as they were two hundred years ago. Despite being one of the most perceptive writers about people and relationships, she never married and always lived with her parents and sister Cassandra. Perhaps unusual for women at that time, Jane Austen was acutely aware of the larger political and social world around her, but chose to focus her novels on the family as a microcosm through which to explore human nature. The prizewinning novelist Carol Shields gives us a beautifully written, perceptive look at the life of one of the finest and most popular English novelists of all time.

With the profound maturity and exquisite eye for detail that never failed to capture readers of her prize-winning novels, Carol Shields dazzles with these remarkable stories. Generous, delightful, and acutely observed, this essential collection illuminates the miracles that grace our lives; it will continue to enchant for years to come.

With the same sensitivity and artfulness that are the trademarks of her award-winning novels, Carol Shields explores the life of a writer whose own novels have engaged and delighted readers for the past two hundred years. In "Jane Austen," Shields follows this superb and beloved novelist from her early family life in Steventown to her later years in Bath, her broken engagement, and her intense relationship with her sister Cassandra. She reveals both the very private woman and the acclaimed author behind the enduring classics "Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice," and "Emma." With its fascinating insights into the writing process from an awarda winning novelist, Carol Shieldsas magnificent biography of Jane Austen is also a compelling meditation on how great fiction is created.

The San Diego Tribune called The Stone Diaries a "universal study of what makes women tick." With Larry's Party Carol Shields has done the same for men. Larry Weller, born in 1950, is an ordinary guy made extraordinary by his creator's perception, irony, and tenderness. Larry's Party gives us, as it were, a CAT scan of his life, in episodes between 1977 and 1997, that seamlessly flash backward and forward. We follow this young floral designer through two marriages and divorces, and his interactions with his parents, friends, and a son. Throughout, we witness his deepening passion for garden mazes--so like life, with their teasing treachery and promise of reward. Among all the paradoxes and accidents of his existence, Larry moves through the spontaneity of the seventies, the blind enchantment of the eighties, and the lean, mean nineties, completing at last his quiet, stubborn search for self. Larry's odyssey mirrors the male condition at the end of our century with targeted wit, unerring poignancy, and faultless wisdom.

From Simon & Schuster, Scribner's Best of the Fiction Workshops 1998 showcases the most exciting and innovative invoice in North American fiction from 1998. Gathered from 100 different workshops, these remarkably diverse stories possess the quality of works by more established authors, while offering the pleasure of discovering the unpredictable and irresistible voices of an up-and-coming generation .

Carol Shields, best known for her fiction writing, received both the Pulitzer Prize and the Governor General's Award for Fiction for her novel The Stone Diaries. But she also wrote hundreds of poems over the span of her career. The Collected Poetry of Carol Shields includes three previously published collections and over eighty unpublished poems, ranging from the early 1970s to Shields's death in 2003. In a detailed introduction and commentary, Nora Foster Stovel contextualizes these poems against the background of Shields's life and oeuvre and the traditions of twentieth-century poetry. She demonstrates how poetry influenced and informed Shields's novels; many of the poems, which constitute miniature narratives, illuminate Shields's fiction and serve as the testing ground for metaphors she later employed in her prose works. Stovel delineates Shields's career-long interest in character and setting, gender and class, self and other, actuality and numinousness, as well as revealing her subversive feminism, which became explicit in Reta Winter's angry (unsent) letters in Unless and in the stories of poet Mary Swann and Daisy Goodwill in Swann and The Stone Diaries. The first complete collection of her poetry, this volume is essential for all readers of Carol Shields. Stovel's detailed annotations, based on research in the Carol Shields fonds at Library and Archives Canada, reveal the poems in all their depth and resonance, and the dignity and consequence they afford to ordinary people.