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“Unless you’re lucky, unless you’re healthy, fertile, unless you’re loved and fed, unless you’re offered what others are offered, you go down in the darkness, down to despair.”
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? Reta’s wit is the weapon she most often brandishes as she kicks against the pricks that have brought her daughter down: Carol Shields brings us Reta’s 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 Shields’s fiction.
source: https://penguinrandomhouse.ca/books/166023/unless#9780307365897
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literary fiction, goodness, Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize winner, Literature, Psychological fiction, Teenage girls, Mothers and daughters, Fiction, Women authors, Mentally ill, Domestic fiction, friends, women, American literature, Mothers and daughters, fiction, Ontario, fiction, Fiction, psychological, Large type books, Literary, Abridged Audio - Fiction/General, Fiction, generalPlaces
Ontario, Toronto, Canada, Bloor Street, Honest Ed's, Nathan Phillips Square, OrangetownShowing 11 featured editions. View all 43 editions?
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Unless: A Novel
2009, Harper Perennial
Paperback
in English
- P.S. edition (7)
0060874406 9780060874407
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Unless: a novel
2003, Fourth Estate
Paperback
in English
- First Fourth Estate paperback edition
0007154615 9780007154616
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Unless
2003, Fourth Estate
Paperback
in English
- 1st Fourth Estate pbk. ed.
0007154615 9780007154616
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11
Unless
2002-05, PerfectBound
Electronic resource
in English
- Adobe Acrobat E-book Reader edition v.1
0060523700 9780060523701
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Reta Winters has many reasons to be happy. 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.
Piercing and sad, astute and evocative, full of tenderness and laughter, Unless will stand with The Stone Diaries in the canon of Carol Shields’s fiction.
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- Created May 1, 2018
- 4 revisions
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June 4, 2021 | Edited by Drini | Fix DDC |
May 1, 2018 | Edited by Lisa | Added edition. |
May 1, 2018 | Edited by Lisa | Added new cover |
May 1, 2018 | Created by Lisa | Added new book. |