Carol Shields books

Anthologies

Collections

Dropped Threads Reading Order

Graphic Novels

Non-Fiction

Penguin Lives Reading Order

Plays

Standalone Novels

Carol Shields was born in Oak Park, Illinois in 1935 and spent most of her adult life in Canada, where she became one of the country’s most celebrated writers. She began publishing fiction in the mid-1970s and built a body of work that spans novels, short stories, poetry, and drama. Her writing has a particular gift for finding significance in the ordinary rhythms of domestic life, looking closely at marriages, friendships, and the small decisions that shape a person over decades.

Her most acclaimed novels include The Stone Diaries, a multi-generational family story narrated in the voice of a woman named Daisy Goodwill Flett, and Larry’s Party, which traces a man’s life through the lens of the mazes he builds. She also contributed the Jane Austen volume to the Penguin Lives biography series. Shields died in 2003, and her final novel Unless was published the previous year to strong critical praise. Posthumous collections of her stories and poetry have continued to bring her work to new readers.