content: Carol Shields' won the Pulitzer Prize for "The Stone Diaries" in 1995. "Small Ceremonies" was her first novel, written in 1977. This novel and the next are each about one of the two sisters born to a working class Toronto family. The writing is gorgeously poetic, teeming with arresting, but completely accessible, similes and metaphors. Her sensitvity to nuances of character and relationship is both accurate and moving. Most of us never heard of her until "The Stone Diaries" -- but we should have!