Carol Shields presents a fictionalised autobiography chronicling the 20th century life of a seemingly ordinary woman born in Canada in 1905.
Carol Shields was born in Chicago but spent much of her life in Canada and England. She published six novels and two collections of short stories.
Mary Swann was her first novel to first to be published in the UK in 1990, followed by Happenstance in 1991 and The Republic of Love in 1992. The Stone Diaries was short-listed for the 1993 Booker Prize and won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1995.
In 1997 her novel Larry’s Party was published and went on to win the UK’s coveted Orange Prize for Women’s Fiction. Her last novel, Unless, was published in the UK in 2002 and was shortlisted for both the Orange Prize and the Booker Prize.