Duet

Orange Prize and Pulitzer Prize-winning Carol Shields’ tender, funny and wonderfully insightful portrait of two sisters struggling to rediscover themselves amidst the perplexing swirl of family life.

Judith is a biographer whose life is subsumed by others: her eccentric husband, her secretive children and the Victorian novelist who is her subject. Her sister Charleen is a single mother and lapsed poet. While Judith analyses the minutiae of lives past and present, Charleen battles her own past ghosts and wonders desperately what her life has been about. As their mother’s wedding approaches, both sisters must come to terms with the paths they have chosen.

Originally published as two companion novels: Small Ceremonies and The Box Garden.

Reviews

‘Carol Shields sings with the charm of a true siren.’ Guardian

‘Carol Shield’s prose is addictive. Her writing is both smoothly intelligent and sensually immediate, conflating concrete domestic realities with the elemental and miraculous.’ Sunday Telegraph

‘Her perceptions are so quick, her style is so acute, that she can tack a breath to the page and skewer a thought on the wing. It is her speciality to isolate moments that remain distinct in the mind for years, perhaps for a lifetime.’ Hilary Mantel, Sunday Times

‘Shields is about the best we have. She does not just express what oft was thought; she snags the shadows of those thoughts, the thoughts we did not know we had. The effect – at once elating and visceral – feels like a conjurer pulling a handkerchief from your heart.’ Daily Telegraph

About the author

Carol Shields’s novels include Larry’s Party (1997), winner of the 1998 Orange Prize, and The Stone Diaries (1993), winner of the Pulitzer Prize and shortlisted for the Booker Prize. She reached this shortlist for the second time in 2002 with Unless.