—Cleveland Plain Dealer
“A fitting farewell from an author revered for her graceful, insightful writing…sparkles with wry humor and elegant irony.”
—Hartford Courant
“Unless isn’t a grand finale to Shields’s oeuvre; it’s not a monumental summing up. It’s a graceful coda, an arabesque performed over an abyss. Reta speaks to us in a voice both calm and urgent. This is no time for prevarication, she seems to say. This is the time for truth.”
—Time Magazine
“If ever a book deserved to be shortlisted for the Booker, it is this one.”
—Publishing News
THE WORK OF CAROL SHIELDS
POETRY
Others
Intersect
Coming to Canada
NOVELS
Larry’s Party
The Stone Diaries
The Republic of Love
A Celibate Season (with Blanche Howard)
Mary Swann
A Fairly Conventional Woman
Happenstance
The Box Garden
Small Ceremonies
STORY COLLECTIONS
Dressing Up for the Carnival
The Orange Fish
Various Miracles
PLAYS
Departures and Arrivals
Thirteen Hands
Fashion, Power, Guilt and the Charity of Families (with Catherine Shields)
Anniversary (with David Williamson)
CRITICISM
Susanna Moodie: Voice and Vision
ANTHOLOGY
Dropped Threads: What We Aren’t Told (Edited with Marjorie Anderson)
Dropped Threads 2: More of What We Aren’t Told
(Edited with Marjorie Anderson)
BIOGRAPHY
Jane Austen: A Penguin Lives Biography
Credits
Cover design by Mary Schuck
Cover photograph of the author at age seven, courtesy of the Shields family
Copyright
UNLESS. Copyright © 2002 by Carol Shields. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
First Fourth Estate paperback published 2003.
First Harper Perennial edition published 2006.
The Library of Congress has catalogued the hardcover edition as follows:
Shields, Carol.
Unless: a novel/Carol Shields.—1st ed.
p. cm.
ISBN 0-00-714107-6 (hc)
1. Mothers and daughters—Fiction. 2. Women authors—Fiction. 3. Teenage girls—Fiction. 4. Mentally ill—Fiction. 5. Ontario—Fiction.
I. Title.
pr9199.3.s514 u55 2002
813'.6—dc21
ISBN-10: 0-06-087440-6 (pbk.)
ISBN-13: 978-0-06-087440-7 (pbk.)
EPub Edition © May 2010 ISBN: 978-0-06-182816-4
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
About the Publisher
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Carol Shields, Unless
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