Unless

"[Shields is] unsparing as she explores the black holes of uncertainty in women's lives . . . these are the dark thoughts of an illuminating novel." —Chicago Tribune

The final book from Pulitzer Prize-winning author Carol Shields, Unless is a harrowing but ultimately consoling story of one family's anguish and healing, proving Shields's mastery of extraordinary fiction about ordinary life.


For all of her life, forty-four-year-old Reta Winters has enjoyed the useful monotony of happiness: a loving family, good friends, growing success as a writer of light "summertime" fiction. But this placid existence is cracked wide open when her beloved eldest daughter, Norah, drops out of college to sit on a gritty street corner, silent but for the sign around her neck that reads "GOODNESS." Reta's search for what drove her daughter to such a desperate statement turns into an unflinching and surprisingly funny meditation on where we find meaning and hope.

"Nothing short of astonishing." —The New Yorker
"A thing of beauty—lucidly written, artfully ordered, riddled with riddles and undergirded with dark layers of philosophical meditations." —Los Angeles Times
"Like The Stone Diaries, which won Shields a Pulitzer Prize, and her tour de force follow-up novel, Larry's Party, Unless presents itself, almost instantly, as a story about ordinary lives. But then, through her sensitive observations and exacting prose, the author proceeds to flip them over and show us their uncommon depths . . . a fine novel." —The Washington Post Book World