Unless
Record details
- ISBN: 9780307365897 (electronic bk.)
- ISBN: 0307365891 (electronic bk.)
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Physical Description:
electronic resource
remote
1 online resource. - Publisher: London ; New York : Fourth Estate, c2002.
Content descriptions
General Note: | Electronic book. |
Search for related items by subject
Subject: | Women authors -- Fiction Mentally ill -- Fiction Teenage girls -- Fiction Mothers and daughters -- Fiction Ontario -- Fiction |
Genre: | Domestic fiction. Psychological fiction. Electronic books. |
Other Formats and Editions
Electronic resources
- Random House, Inc.
âUnless youâre lucky, unless youâre healthy, fertile, unless youâre loved and fed, unless youâre offered what others are offered, you go down in the darkness, down to despair.â
Reta Winters has many reasons to be happy: Her three almost grown daughters. Her twenty-year relationship with their father. Her work translating the larger-than-life French intellectual and feminist Danielle Westerman. Her modest success with a novel of her own, and the clamour of her American publisher for a sequel. Then in the spring of her forty-fourth year, all the quiet satisfactions of her well-lived life disappear in a moment: her eldest daughter Norah suddenly runs from the family and ends up mute and begging on a Toronto street corner, with a hand-lettered sign reading GOODNESS around her neck.
GOODNESS. With the inconceivable loss of her daughter like a lump in her throat, Reta tackles the mystery of this message. What in this world has broken Norah, and what could bring her back to the provisional safety of home? Retaâs wit is the weapon she most often brandishes as she kicks against the pricks that have brought her daughter down: Carol Shields brings us Retaâs voice in all its poignancy, outrage and droll humour.
Piercing and sad, astute and evocative, full of tenderness and laughter, Unless will stand with The Stone Diaries in the canon of Carol Shieldsâs fiction.