Carol Shields

If you have not read Carol Shields' novels, please put them at the top of your to-read lists. This Canadian author wrote some 20 books, all wonderful, but I particularly recommend three. Her first big success, "The Stone Diaries" (1994), won both the Pulitzer Prize and the Governor General's Award. It is the story of the long life of an "ordinary" woman, Daisy Goodwill; it explores the concept of how we understand our own lives. "Larry's Party" (1997) tells the story of an equally "ordinary" man who works as a florist and then, surprising himself and everyone else, becomes a famous builder of garden mazes. The title refers to the dinner party that takes place at the end of the novel, one at which Larry's current lover and his two ex-wives are present. "Unless" (2002) tells of a mother and her bafflement when her college-age daughter inexplicably starts silently panhandling on the corner of a busy Toronto street. All three novels are very original, beautifully written, with an almost Woolfian lyricism, yet are very concrete and down to earth as well. Sadly, Carol Shields died in 2003; she is greatly missed.