Shields won the Pulitzer and the Orange Prize

Carol Shields was nominated for the 2002 Booker Prize for her final novel Unless. Below is an extract from the book.

Chapter Nine - Thus.

I enjoyed having company in the kitchen in the early morning. I loved her sleepy, yawning, mussed look, merging with what I thought of as the careless use of herself in the world - the untidy Bathurst apartment, Ben, the passion for Flaubert - all of which I would never understand completely because it was unhinged from my own frame of time, the sixties child, the nineties child.

For the moment, though, I had her to myself. She was wearing one of my cast-off robes that zipped up the front, that awful burgandy colour, her body lending grace to the awkward lines.

But I was suddenly alerted to something about her presence: the fact that her face looked oddly fallen. Her eyes were swollen, filled, though not with tears. What I glimpsed there was something hard, fixed, chitinous. What was it? "We are real only in our moments of recognition" - who said that? I was recognising something now. I put on my reading glasses and looked at my daughter again, closely. I made her turn toward the window so that the light fell across her eyes and on her hard little upper lip. She blinked at last, then closed her eyes against the light and against me.