The Stone Diaries
From AwardAnnals
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| Author(s) | Carol Shields |
|---|---|
| Publisher | Penguin Books |
| Honors | |
| The Stone Diaries is the story of one woman’s life; a truly sensuous novel that reflects and illuminates the unsettled decades of our century. Born in 1905, Daisy Goodwill drifts through the chapters of childhood, marriage, widowhood, remarriage, motherhood and old age. Bewildered by her inability to understand her own role, Daisy attempts to find a way to tell her own story within a novel that is itself about the limitations of autobiography. | |
The Stone Diaries is the story of one woman’s life; a truly sensuous novel that reflects and illuminates the unsettled decades of our century.
Born in 1905, Daisy Goodwill drifts through the chapters of childhood, marriage, widowhood, remarriage, motherhood and old age. Bewildered by her inability to understand her own role, Daisy attempts to find a way to tell her own story within a novel that is itself about the limitations of autobiography.
Honors
- 1995 Pulitzer–fiction winner
- 1994 NBCC–Fiction winner
- 1993 Governor General's winner
- 1993 Booker shortlist
- Score: 36.45
Reviews
Amazon.com
This fictionalized autobiography of Daisy Goodwill Flett, captured in Daisy’s vivacious yet reflective voice, has been winning over readers since its publication in 1995, when it won the Pulitzer Prize. After a youth marked by sudden death and loss, Daisy escapes into conventionality as a middle-class wife and mother. Years later she becomes a successful garden columnist and experiences the kind of awakening that thousands of her contemporaries in mid-century yearned for but missed in alcoholism, marital infidelity and bridge clubs. The events of Daisy’s life, however, are less compelling than her rich, vividly described inner life—from her memories of her adoptive mother to her awareness of impending death. Shields’ sensuous prose and her deft characterizations make this, her sixth novel, her most successful yet.
