‘Art is despair with dignity’

Various Miracles Paperback

Various Miracles

Carol Shields

‘Shield writes with that big heart of hers ablaze’
Sunday Times

Slyly and perceptively, Carol Shields surveys the whole range of life’s surprises, the quirks of chance and conincidence, the setbacks and improvisations. The stories collected here offer an entrancing look at some of the various miracles of everyday life: the housewife who transforms herself into a successful saleswoman; the special intimacy that binds a group of strangers at an evening class; the ideal husband who is really an arrogant bore and the prosaic woman who becomes a poem.

Reviews of Various Miracles

    • ‘Carol Shelds’s short stories are full of sentences you could almost sing… [her] sentences transmute base metal into gold.’Independent
    • ‘Shields’s stories are spiked by moments of supernatural transcendence.’Victoria Glendinning
    • ‘Shields’s outlines of lives, witty and generous, are alive with a fragile incandescence.’Independent on Sunday
    • ‘Carol Shields manages in a particularly original way to turn water into wine, transfiguring the mundane with meaning.’The Times

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