Small Ceremonies

Carol Shields

3.75

1,176 ratings by Goodreads

ISBN 10: 1531819311 ISBN 13: 9781531819316

Publisher: Audible Studios on Brilliance Audio, 2016

What is the matter with me, I wonder. Why am I always the one who watches? Judith Gill lives with her husband, son, and daughter in a nice house in the suburbs of Ontario. She has carved out a niche as a respected biographer. Her universe is shaped and bounded by the lives around her, from her family to the subjects of her books. She finds herself in the background of her life, but she hungers to tell stories of her own. In this witty, nuanced novel about art, life, love, and fiction, Carol Shields reveals Judith to listeners and to herself - a woman with bold emotions, powerful instincts, and a knack for observing the small ceremonies that give our lives meaning.

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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.

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