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