The Stone Diaries

The Stone Diaries
First Canadian edition
Author(s)	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	0-394-22362-4
OCLC Number	28022123

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).

Part of the setting for the book is the historic Vinegar Hill neighborhood of Bloomington, Indiana.

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.

External links

• Men and Women, Forever Misaligned: Review by the NYTimes
• Randomhouse.ca page on the novel
• Photos of the first edition of The Stone Diaries

Awards
Preceded by The English Patient	Governor General's Award 1993	Succeeded by A Discovery of Strangers