The Stone Diaries

by Shields, Carol

• ISBN13: 9780670853090
• ISBN10: 0670853097
• eBook ISBN(s): 9781101078983
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 1994-03-01
• Publisher: Viking Pr
• More Book Details
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Summary

The Stone Diaries is one ordinary woman's story of her journey through life. Born in 1905, Daisy Stone Goodwill drifts through the roles of child, wife, widow, and mother, and finally into her old age. Bewildered by her inability to understand her place in her own life, Daisy attempts to find a way to tell her story within a novel that is itself about the limitations of autobiography. Her life is vivid with incident, and yet she feels a sense of powerlessness. She listens, she observes, and through sheer force of imagination she becomes a witness of her own life: her birth, her death, and the troubling misconnections she discovers between. Daisy's struggle to find a place for herself in her own life is a paradigm of the unsettled decades of our era. A witty and compassionate anatomist of the human heart, Carol Shields has made distinctively her own that place where the domestic collides with the elemental. With irony and humor she weaves the strands of The Stone Diaries together in this, her richest and most poignant novel to date.

Author Biography

Carol Shields (1935-2003) is the author of The Stone Diaries, which won the 1995 Pulitzer Prize for fiction, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and Canada's Governor General's Award. Her other novels and short-story collections include The Republic of Love, Happenstance, Swann, The Orange Fish, Various Miracles, The Box Garden, and Small Ceremonies (all available from Penguin).

Table of Contents

Family tree
Birth, 1905	1	(40)
Childhood, 1916	41	(38)
Marriage, 1927	79	(42)
Love, 1936	121	(36)
Motherhood, 1947	157	(40)
Work, 1955--1964	197	(32)
Sorrow, 1965	229	(36)
Ease, 1977	265	(44)
Illness and Decline, 1985	309	(34)
Death	343