Book summary

Reta Winters is a successful novelist, Tom is a doctor, and they've been living together for over 20 years. Life has been good until Reta's daughter Norah leaves home and becomes a street person in Toronto. Carol Shields's novel--which she claims will be her last (she was suffering from terminal cancer when she wrote it)--is about not only family and its complexities, but the literary life and its intersection with what is real. A New York Times Notable Book for 2002.

Media reviews

"The philosophical questions don't emerge with the same brilliance as Shields's portrait of the writer or her modest claim for the importance of a female perspective on tragedy. Still, there's enough here to maintain her claim as one of our most gifted and probing novelists."