Small Ceremonies - Softcover

Shields, Carol

Softcover

ISBN 10: 039422101X ISBN 13: 9780394221014

Publisher: Random House of Canada Ltd, 1991

Synopsis

The superb first novel from the author of The Stone Diaries, winner of the Governor General's Award, a National Book Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize.

Judith Gill is a well-respected biographer who desperately wants to write fiction. When she joins her academic husband on sabbatical in Birmingham, she finds on the shelves of their rented flat the notes of a failed novelist. With considerable guilt, Judith decides to plagiarize one of the ideas and brings it home to Canada to work on. Frustrated by the creative process but determined to be more imaginative, Judith attends writing classes and later discovers that her tutor, suffering from writer's block, has ripped off 'her' idea. Once again, Shields focuses her sharp gaze on the small ceremonies of life in this novel of rare intelligence and wit.

About this title

From the Back Cover:

Judith Gill is writing a biography of a minor Victorian novelist. Judith has also written a novel of her own, but is unhappy with it. Is the plot original – or is it plagiarised? And when she discovers her own novel has just been plundered can she fairly justify the anger she feels? In the perplexing swirl of family life are her husband, who keeps odd balls of wool in a bottom drawer, and her son, who shares his secrets only with a penfriend.

Lacking the certainty of youth and not yet reaping the wisdom of older age, Judith Gill is at the centre of a beautifully realised novel that is tender, funny and insightful.

'Small Ceremonies' is the companion novel to 'The Box Garden'

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About the Author:

Carol Shields is the award-winning author of numerous novels, plays and story collections. Her novel The Stone Diaries won the Governor General’s Award for fiction in Canada, the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award in the United States, and the Prix de Lire in France. Her most recent novel, Larry’s Party, won the Orange Prize for Fiction. In 2000 the government of France appointed Carol Shields as a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. Her anthology of women’s writing, Dropped Threads (co-edited with Marjorie Anderson), has been a national bestseller since it was published in February 2001. Shields lives in Victoria, B.C.

About this edition

• Publisher: Random House of Canada Ltd
• Publication date: 1991
• ISBN 10: 039422101X
• ISBN 13: 9780394221014
• Binding: Paperback