UNLESS by Carol Shields (Fourth Estate, $24.95)

AUTHOR CAROL Shields, who penned the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Stone Diaries, asks readers of her new novel, Unless, to understand what it means to be profoundly unhappy. “Happiness is the lucky pane of glass you carry in your head,” she writes. “It takes all your cunning just to hang on to it, and once it’s smashed you have to move into a different sort of life.”

Shields, a master at rounding out lives so vividly that you almost expect to run into her characters at the grocery store, draws an indelible portrait of Reta Winters, a 43-year-old writer/translator whose 19-year-old daughter, Norah, suddenly becomes a panhandler in downtown Toronto with a cardboard sign around her neck that enigmatically reads “goodness.” Reta sees her daughter’s break with the world as a feminist epiphany—a response to her role as a woman without a voice and without the power to effect change. Unable to help her daughter, Reta quietly puts her grief to use by keeping the rest of her family around the dinner table and by writing. (She’s at work on a comic novel, a sequel to her well-received debut, and writes pointed letters in response to articles by male academics who exclude female writers from their discussions.)

Shields, who herself is near the end of a long battle with breast cancer, has boiled life down to its very essences here. Happiness, loss, success, and fame are fleeting; through Reta’s search for meaning, however, Shields writes her own, beautiful goodbye that will move readers for years to come.

Emily Russin info@seattleweekly.com