-
Access Our
Best Book Club
Books of 2025!
These two unique novels tell the stories of Jack and Brenda Bowman during a rare weekend apart in their many years of marriage.
Jack is at home coping with domestic crises and two uncouth adolescents, while immobilized by self-doubt and questioning his worth as a historian. Brenda, travelling alone for the first time, is in a strange city grappling with an array of emotions and toying with the idea of an affair. Intimate and insightful yet never sentimental, Happenstance is a profound portrait of a marriage and the differences between the sexes that bring life — and a sense of isolation — into even the most loving of relationships.
Media reviews not yet available.
This information about Happenstance was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Born and brought up in Chicago (in the same suburb as Ernest Hemingway), Carol lived in Canada since 1957.
She died of cancer in July 2003. at the age of 68.
She is survived by her husband, Don, and their children John, Anne, Catherine, Meg and Sara.
The Stone Diaries was nominated for The Man Booker Prize Best Novel and won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction Best Novel. She won the Orange Prize for Fiction for Larry's Party. Unless was nominated for the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction, The Man Booker Prize and the Orange Prize for Fiction Best Novel.
Bibliography
Novels
Small Ceremonies (1976)
The Box Garden (1977)
Happenstance (1980)
A Fairly Conventional Woman (1982)
Mary Swann (1987) aka Swann
The Orange Fish (1989)
A Celibate ...
... Full Biography
Author Interview
Link to Carol Shields's Website
Life is the garment we continually alter, but which never seems to fit.
Click Here to find out who said this, as well as discovering other famous literary quotes!
Your guide toexceptional books
BookBrowse seeks out and recommends the best in contemporary fiction and nonfiction—books that not only engage and entertain but also deepen our understanding of ourselves and the world around us.
