Bücher von Carol Shields

With the same sensitivity and artfulness that are the trademarks of her award-winning novels, Carol Shields explores the life of a writer whose own novels have engaged and delighted readers for the past two hundred years. In Jane Austen, Shields follows this superb and beloved novelist from her early family life in Steventown to her later years in Bath, her broken engagement, and her intense relationship with her sister Cassandra. She reveals both the very private woman and the acclaimed author behind the enduring classics Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, and Emma. With its fascinating insights into the writing process from an award-winning novelist, Carol Shields's magnificent biography of Jane Austen is also a compelling meditation on how great fiction is created.

The San Diego Tribune called The Stone Diaries a "universal study of what makes women tick." With Larry's Party Carol Shields has done the same for men. Larry Weller, born in 1950, is an ordinary guy made extraordinary by his creator's perception, irony, and tenderness. Larry's Party gives us, as it were, a CAT scan of his life, in episodes between 1977 and 1997, that seamlessly flash backward and forward. We follow this young floral designer through two marriages and divorces, and his interactions with his parents, friends, and a son. Throughout, we witness his deepening passion for garden mazes--so like life, with their teasing treachery and promise of reward. Among all the paradoxes and accidents of his existence, Larry moves through the spontaneity of the seventies, the blind enchantment of the eighties, and the lean, mean nineties, completing at last his quiet, stubborn search for self. Larry's odyssey mirrors the male condition at the end of our century with targeted wit, unerring poignancy, and faultless wisdom.

An einem allzu heißen Nachmittag des Jahres 1905 kommt Daisy Goodwill in einer Sturzgeburt auf die Welt. Die Mutter stirbt, Grund für die lebenslange Trauer ihres verträumten Vaters. Daisy wächst bei der Nachbarin Clarentine und deren Sohn Barker auf, der später Daisys große Liebe werden wird. Doch bis dahin muss sie eine schwierige Jugend und eine unglückliche erste Ehe durchleben. Zufriedenheit erfährt Daisy erst mit Barker und den gemeinsamen Kindern. Im hohen Alter vom Leben gebeutelt, macht Daisy noch eine große Reise, ehe sie in einem Altersheim die Vergänglichkeit erleidet und stirbt.