A mysterious stanger arrives at a rual Sussex inn on a cold winter's night with his face obscured by bandages and his body cloaked in a long, heavy coat. He locks himself in his room and spends his stay labouring over chemicals in intricate glass bottles. The villagers, bewildered by what lurks under the bandages, could never be prepared for the terrible truth: that the man is a scientist who has rendered himself invisible and is desperately struggling...

"[Shields is] unsparing as she explores the black holes of uncertainty in women's lives . . . these are the dark thoughts of an illuminating novel." —Chicago Tribune
The final book from Pulitzer Prize-winning author Carol Shields, Unless is a harrowing but ultimately consoling story of one family's anguish and healing, proving Shields's mastery of extraordinary fiction about ordinary life.
For all of her life, forty-four-year-old...

Pepper is a rambunctious big man, and, suddenly, the surprised inmate of a budget-strapped mental institution in Queens, New York. He's not mentally ill, but that doesn't seem to matter. On his first night, he's visited by a terrifying creature who nearly kills him before being hustled away by the hospital staff. It's no delusion: The other patients confirm that a hungry devil roams the hallways when the sun goes down. Pepper rallies three other inmates...

In this “charming” and melancholic novel, a former child sleuth “investigates the hard-to-crack case of Lost Innocence” (Entertainment Weekly).
 
A Chicago Tribune, Kirkus Reviews, and Booklist Book of the Year
 
In the twilight of a mysterious childhood full of wonder, Billy Argo, boy detective, is brokenhearted to find that his younger sister and crime-solving...

A mordant, wickedly subversive parable set in a mental ward, the novel chronicles the head-on collision between its hell-raising, life-affirming hero Randle Patrick McMurphy and the totalitarian rule of Big Nurse. McMurphy swaggers into the mental ward like a blast of fresh air and turns the place upside down, starting a gambling operation, smuggling in wine and women, and egging on the other patients to join him in open rebellion. But McMurphy's...

Gifted but severely mentally disturbed, sixteen-year-old Grace moves back and forth between school and hospital, where she receives unexpected support from an antisocial delinquent named Luke.

High school student Alex Winchester struggles to hold her life together in the face of her mother's threatening delusions about being Amelia Earhart.

"Since Shelbi enrolled at Windward Academy as a senior and won't be there very long, she hasn't bothered making friends. What her classmates don't know about her can't be used to hurt her--you know, like it did at her last school. Andy Criddle is not okay. At all. He's had far too much to drink. Again. Which is bad. And things are about to get worse. When Shelbi sees Andy at his lowest, she can relate. So she doesn't resist reaching out. And there's...

Eleven-year-old Fig enrolls in an art class to better understand her father, a composer and pianist whose mental illness she tries to conceal from classmates, neighbors, and social services.-- Provided by Publisher.

Looking for adventure and a new life, Ishmael, the story's narrator, decides to find work on a whaling boat. On arriving at the Massachusetts harbour to begin his search, the only bed available is already half occupied by a "cannibal" named Queequeg. Although Queequeg has limited English, a friendship forms and the two men sign up for work together aboard the Pequod under the infamous Captain Ahab.