Celibate Season

Written in the early 1980s, A CELIBATE SEASON is an epistolary novel and a collaboration between the now well-known writer Carol Shields and her friend Blanche Howard. Shields writes the letters of Chas, a Vancouver architect out of a job; Howard writes those of his wife, Jocelyn, who has gone to Ottawa for nine months to work while Chas stays home with the kids. Awkward at first in their reversed roles, Chas and Jocelyn gradually come to terms with their new lives and, in fact, begin to enjoy them--and, perhaps, to find themselves ready for drastic changes in their marriage.