The Republic of Love - Softcover

Carol Shields

3.74

2,859 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1841154679 ISBN 13: 9781841154671

Publisher: Harpercollins Pb, 2001

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'"The Republic of Love" marries a wide diversity of elements, mythical and modern, ironic and moving, exhilarating and melancholy!a love-surveying story that is enticingly seductive.' Times Literary Supplement '"The Republic of Love" is a hymn to the pleasures and pains, the raptures even of an unspectacular life. Fay discovers that happiness is "a kind of by-product of existence, and not an end in itself". This piece of knowledge saves her, Shields suggests, from the watery, ambiguous yearning of the mermaid, "plaintive, coy", wordlessly calling out to no one. A simple message, but Shields delivers it with so much grace and so little pretension, that it is impossible not to be enchanted by her voice. She sings with the charm of a true siren. In her hands, we believe, anything can happen.' Guardian 'A novel that's so engrossing it makes you want to retire to a squashy sofa until you reach the end. Vividly fresh!glittering and spangled with fabulous surprises.' Sunday Times

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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:

With a viewpoint that shifts as crisply as cards in the hands of a blackjack dealer, Carol Shields introduces us to two shell-shocked veterans of the wars of the heart. There's Fay, a folklorist whose passion for mermaids has kept her from focusing on any one man. And right across the street there's Tom, a popular radio talk-show host who has focused a little too intently, having married and divorced three times.

Can Fay believe in lasting love with such a man? Will romantic love conquer all rational expectations? Only Carol Shields could describe so adroitly this couple who fall in love as thoroughly and satisfyingly as any Victorian couple and the modern complications that beset them in this touching and ironic book.

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