The Stone Diaries

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The Stone Diaries

First Canadian edition
Author Carol Shields
Cover artist Andrea Pinnington (design); David Purdie (photography)
Country Canada
Language English
Publisher Random House of Canada
Publication date 1993
Pages 361 pp
ISBN ISBN 0-394-22362-4

The Stone Diaries is a 1993 award winning novel by Carol Shields.

It is the fictional autobiography about the life of Daisy Goodwill Flett, a seemingly ordinary woman whose life is marked by death and loss from the beginning, when her mother dies during childbirth. Through marriage and motherhood, Daisy struggles to find contentment, never truly understanding her life's true purpose.

The book's title may have been inspired by Pat Lowther's poetry collection A Stone Diary (1977). Lowther's murder in 1975 was the inspiration for Shields' earlier novel Swann: A Mystery (1987).

[edit] Awards and nominations

The Stone Diaries, which is Shields' most famous novel, won the 1993 Governor General's Award for English language fiction in Canada and the 1995 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in the United States. It is currently the only novel to have won both awards, because being an American-born naturalized Canadian, Shields was eligible for both.

It also won the National Book Critics Circle Award and was nominated for the Man Booker Prize.

[edit] External links

Awards
Preceded by
The Shipping News
by E. Annie Proulx
Pulitzer Prize for Fiction
1995
Succeeded by
Independence Day
by Richard Ford
Preceded by
The English Patient
Governor General's Award
1993
Succeeded by
A Discovery of Strangers