The Stone Diaries

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 a truly sensuous novel that reflects and illuminates the unsettled decades of our century. – back cover of the 2002 Vintage Canada paperback edition

Winner Pulitzer Prize 1995
Winner Governor General's Award 1993
Winner McNally Robinson Book of the Year Award 1993
Shortlisted Man Booker Award 1993
Winner Canadian Booksellers Association Libris Award — Author of the Year 1994
Nominated National Book Critics Circle Award 1994
Nominated International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award
Nominated New York Times Notable Book of the Year Nominated Publishers Weekly Best Books of the Year — Adult

"Carol Shields has explored the mysteries of life with abandon, taking unusual risks along the way. The Stone Diaries reminds us again why literature matters." – The New York Times Book Review

"Shields has crafted a small miracle of a novel, a rock-solid monument to the ephemeral nature of all lives, to the different selves a single life can house." – Maclean's

"Shields's fine new novel is a rapturous, sensitive and funny inquiry…charming and warm and sensuously detailed; the prose has a kind of buttery ease." – The Guardian

"Engrossing, ambitious…ranging from bleak to the extremely funny, as robust in its realism as it is subtle in its perceptiveness." – The Sunday Times