Book description
These companion novels - by turns touching, compassionate and humorous
- tell the stories of Jack and Brenda Bowman. In all the years of their
marriage they have hardly ever been apart.
Brenda, now forty-years-old, is about to take her first trip alone.
Vulnerable, in a strange city, she is also ready to grasp whatever
experiences come her way. Back home in Chicago, Jack faces his own
crisis. Immobilised by self-doubt, he begins to question his worth and
the value of his work as a historian. Suddenly, in that one week, his
world falls apart. 'The beautiful irony of “Happenstance” is that its
novels are both bound together and held apart by the strength of the
marriage they describe.' Rupert Christiansen, Harpers and Queen
'A compassionate, funny, multi-layered work about the elusive nature of
history. With dazzling deftness Shields demonstrates the alienation
innate in the most loving relationships between the sexes. Taken as one
story or two, this is a remarkable, perceptive and painfully accurate
work that yields more with each reading.' Sunday Times
'An instinct for the patterns of everyday speech, a willingness to
ferret out psychological nuances and a gift for investing her characters
with the appearance of a living, breathing reality. Shields has a
generous and unblinking sense of the complexity of forces which draw
people to one another.' Jonathon Coe, Guardian
'A celebration of marriage as historical accident, it makes a
delightful portrait of a partnership, full of quirky humour between two
people who are at once familiars and strangers to each other.' Antonia
Bremner, The Times
'Shields is an acute recorder of contemporary mores. This novel
resounds with a humanity and generosity that is truly memorable.' Kevin
Loader, Daily Telegraph
'The single biggest pleasure, though, remains Shield's prose, at once
dense and duplicate. Its great strength has always been its ability to
capture small moments and make them important.' Literary Review Carol
Shields's novels include Larry's Party (1997) - winner of the 1998
Orange Prize - and The Stone Diaries (1993), winner of the Pulitzer
Prize and short-listed for the Booker Prize.
