The Stone Diaries

By: Carol Shields, Penelope Lively - introduction

Narrated by: Deborah Drakeford

Winner of the Governor General’s Literary Award and the Pulitzer Prize, and Shortlisted for the Booker Prize

Born in 1905, Daisy Goodwill Flett drifts through the chapters of childhood, marriage, widowhood, remarriage, motherhood, and old age, bewildered by her inability to understand her own role in the unsettled decades of the twentieth century. At last, reflecting on her unobserved and unconventional life, Daisy attempts to find a way to tell her story within a novel that is itself about the limitations of autobiography.

In The Stone Diaries, one of the most successful and acclaimed novels of our time, Carol Shields weaves the strands of Daisy’s life together in a rich, sensuous, and poignant work that delivers lasting insights into the nature of life—and fiction.

Critic reviews

"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's storytelling is at its most ambitious and compelling." —The Toronto Star

"A beautiful, darkly ironic novel of misunderstanding and missed opportunites." —Esquire

Excellent Narrative

Enjoyed the whole story. The feminist ideas, the historical details, the ways in which the author shows what we think we know about each other versus what is really in the other person's mind, the arc of time. Wonderful.

basic americana

simple story of a family but I have no idea why it won a Pulitzer

Stone diaries

Not what I thought it would be. Fell asleep during the first hours. Woke up at chapter 5. This maybe okay for a new be parent but not for someone with teens and older. Been there done that.

Boring and Mundane

I do not understand why this book won the Pulitzer Prize unless it is due to the fact that the prize board was (though its membership remains “secret”) in 2018 revealed to be 2/3 male. When Shields won in 1995, I bet there was an even greater gender imbalance. I say that because if you compare the content of this book to that of another book that celebrates the independent inner life of women, their frustration, joys, defeats and victories, and does so in a ground-breaking literary style, Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, the latter stands like a Titan beside this mouse of a book so self-obsessed with every little minute boring detail, as if just being detailed and written in lyrical prose were enough to justify relating the story of these characters’ boring lives. Frankly, I can’t see how any smart, creative, feminist reader would enjoy such a book. I only finished it because it was a book club choice.