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In her empathetic, elegantly wrought novels, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Carol Shields portrayed a world very much like our own: at times confusing, painful, and joyous, and populated with characters as complex as those we know in life. Shields passed away on July 16, 2003 after a long battle with breast cancer, leaving a formidable literary legacy.

In celebration of the fifteenth anniversary of its original publication, Carol Shields's Pulitzer Prize—winning novel is now available in a Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition

ONE OF THE MOST successful and acclaimed novels of our time, this fictionalized autobiography of Daisy Goodwill Flett is a subtle but affecting portrait of an everywoman reflecting on an unconventional life. What transforms this seemingly ordinary tale is the richness of Daisy's vividly described inner life—from her earliest memories of her adoptive mother to her awareness of impending death.

Publishers Weekly

Any performer has her work cut out for her when a novel takes place in several settings with inhabitants possessing distinctive regional accents. Shield's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel takes the listener from the plains of central Canada to Bloomington, Ind., and the Orkney Islands. Botsford is an excellent performer with a smooth and easy-to-listen-to reading voice, but she doesn't have a gift for imitating linguistic variations. The women of Daisy's Bloomington circle have Southern lilts worthy of Gone with the Wind. Readers would expect the voices of this coterie to age as Daisy does, but no accommodation is made for this possibility. Within each locale the voices are quite distinct, though the voice of Daisy, the center of the novel, stands out least of all, appropriately enough, for in this work we see her life through the eyes of others. This is an important and deft novel and it's about time that it was recorded, even in this overly abridged version. Shields's writing still makes this worth a listen. Available as a Penguin paperback. (Oct.) Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.