num_pages: 361
description: 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 missed connections 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.
language: English
title: The Stone Diaries
titlecomplete: The Stone Diaries
genres: Canada, Historical Fiction, Canadian Literature, Literary Fiction, Novels, Womens, Literature, Classics, Fiction, Contemporary
ratings_count: 39551
places: Canada, Indiana
awards: awardedAt: 725875200000
name: Booker Prize, awardedAt: 788947200000
name: Pulitzer Prize
category: Fiction, awardedAt: 757411200000
name: National Book Critics Circle Award
category: Fiction, awardedAt: 725875200000
name: Governor General's Literary Awards / Prix littéraires du Gouverneur général
category: Fiction, awardedAt: 725875200000
name: McNally Robinson Book of the Year Award
publisher: Penguin Books