Small Ceremonies - Softcover

Shields, Carol Diggory

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0140251456 ISBN 13: 9780140251456

Publisher: Penguin Books, 1996

Synopsis

Judith Gill's world is shaped by the actions of those around her. As a biographer, she spends her days analyzing the minutiae of past lives. As a mother, she is perplexed by her children's developing lives. As a wife, she struggles to sympathize with and support a man who sometimes acts like a stranger. Her own life recedes, overshadowed by the urge to observe and understand the people she encounters. Yet, in this lovingly documented year of a woman's life, Judith is revealed to herself; a person with desires, passions, and faults; with instincts that are sometimes right and often wrong. And it is through the very observations she can't help but make that Judith finds her place in the world: as translator and celebrant of life's small - and very important - ceremonies.

About this title

Book Description:

Carol Shields wrote dazzling, haunting stories of lives just like ours, turning our interior worlds into beautiful labyrinths—a writer worthy of comparison to fellow Canadian greats Alice Munro and Margaret Atwood.

From the Inside Flap:

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 edition

• Publisher: Penguin Books
• Publication date: 1996
• ISBN 10: 0140251456
• ISBN 13: 9780140251456
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 181