Duet

Carol Shield's tender, funny and wonderfully insightful portrait of two sisters struggling to rediscover themselves amidst the perplexing swirl of family life. Judith is a biographer whose life is subsumed by others: a husband who keeps secret balls of wool in a bottom drawer, two children who share their deepest thoughts only with strangers and the Victorian novelist who is her subject. Her sister Charleen is a single mother and lapsed poet with a marvellously uncomplicated son, Seth. As Judith analyses the minutiae of past lives while striving to support those of the present, Charleen battles her own past ghosts and wonders desperately what her life has been about. When the sisters are reunited for their mother's wedding, Seth disappears in a turn of events that reveals some shocking truths. Judith's struggle to manage the perplexing swirl of her family life is wonderfully balanced with Charleen's piercing gift of observation in this tender, funny and insightful portrait of two sisters learning to come to terms with the lives they have chosen.

'Carol Shields sings with the charm of a true siren.' Guardian 'Carol Shield's prose is addictive. Her writing is both smoothly intelligent and sensually immediate, conflating concrete domestic realities with the elemental and miraculous.' Sunday Telegraph 'Her perceptions are so quick, her style is so acute, that she can tack a breath to the page and skewer a thought on the wing. It is her speciality to isolate moments that remain distinct in the mind for years, perhaps for a lifetime.' Hilary Mantel, Sunday Times 'Shields is about the best we have. She does not just express what oft was thought; she snags the shadows of those thoughts, the thoughts we did not know we had. The effect -- at once elating and visceral -- feels like a conjurer pulling a handkerchief from your heart.' Daily Telegraph

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