The Stone Diaries

Carol Shields

Sep 2011 · Vintage Canada

About this ebook

Winner of the Governor General’s Literary Award and the Pulitzer Prize, and Shortlisted for the Booker Prize

Born in 1905, Daisy Goodwill Flett drifts through the chapters of childhood, marriage, widowhood, remarriage, motherhood, and old age, bewildered by her inability to understand her own role in the unsettled decades of the twentieth century. At last, reflecting on her unobserved and unconventional life, Daisy attempts to find a way to tell her story within a novel that is itself about the limitations of autobiography.

In The Stone Diaries, one of the most successful and acclaimed novels of our time, Carol Shields weaves the strands of Daisy’s life together in a rich, sensuous, and poignant work that delivers lasting insights into the nature of life—and fiction.

About the author

Born in Oak Park, Illinois, in 1935, Carol Shields moved to Canada at the age of twenty-two, after studying at the University of Exeter in England, and then obtained her M.A. at the University of Ottawa. She started publishing poetry in her thirties, and wrote her first novel, Small Ceremonies, in 1976. Over the next three decades, Shields would become the author of over twenty books, including plays, poetry, essays, short fiction, novels , a book of criticism on Susanna Moodie and a biography of Jane Austen. Larry's Party (1997) was the novel that followed her Pulitzer-Prize-winning The Stone Diaries. Published in several countries, it was adapted into a musical stage play, won England’s Orange Prize (now the Women's Prize), given to the best book by a woman writer in the English-speaking world. Shields’s final novel, Unless, was shortlisted for the Booker, Orange and Giller prizes and the Governor General’s Literary Award, and won the Ethel Wilson Prize for Fiction. Shields died on July 16, 2003, from complications of breast cancer, at age 68.