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“... The Canadian writer Alice Munro once likened a good short story to a commodious house whose every room possesses an exterior door. So accommodating a house, she wrote, is capable of admitting visitors through any number of openings, just as a story can be entered by way of its separate sections or paragraphs or even its individual sentences or words ...”

“... then, which recalls the mermaid metaphors, ‘giving off the fishy perfume of ambiguity’ in Shields’s last novel, The Republic of Love. The present book is just as readable, but more disconcerting. The section headings – Birth, 1905; Child-hood, 1916; Marriage, 1927; Love, 1936; Motherhood, 1947; Work, 1955-64; Sorrow, 1965; Ease, 1977; Illness and ...”

“... agree that such transformations are a liberation, however. In her recent biography of Austen, Carol Shields was also writing about her own credo as a woman novelist whose subjects have been domestic, whose endings have been happy, and whose literary ambitions have been trivialised. First, she insists, ‘Austen’s short life may have been lived in ...”

“... Syndrome, brought on while he was shaving in an aircraft flying through a thunderstorm. Even Carol Shields’s The Republic of Love, by far the most mundane of these novels, starts off with a sentence that could easily have graced a Science Fiction magazine: ‘As a baby, Tom Avery had 27 mothers’. ‘It was the idea of the bodiless head which ...”

“... to it are so parochial, that it is hard to make a hero out of a professor with a moral problem. In Carol Shields’s Happenstance Jack Bowman, cornered in his job at an academic institute, living with his wife Brenda in the suburbs of Chicago, has to see his friend Bernie through marital troubles just when his own career seems threatened by the ...”

“... Forster deploys here to make it otherwise. Mary Swann is the first book by the Canadian writer Carol Shields to be published in this country. This is a very good novel, alive in every sense: formally ingenious and inventive, strikingly evocative of place, of character, of the world of things, capable of both comedy and tenderness, and above all ...”

“... who you do it with.She spent a few days dipping into novels – Penelope Fitzgerald, Anne Tyler, Carol Shields, Beryl Bainbridge, William Trevor, Tim Parks among others – to limber up. Then she rolled up her sleeves and having extracted the technical nuts and bolts (beginning, middle, end; main and subsidiary plot and characters), wrote Naim ...”