The Stone Diaries: Pulitzer Prize Winner (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition) - Softcover

Carol Shields

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0143105507 ISBN 13: 9780143105503

Publisher: Penguin Classics, 2008

Synopsis

In celebration of the fifteenth anniversary of its original publication, Carol Shields's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel is now available in a Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition

One of the most successful and acclaimed novels of our time, this fictionalized autobiography of Daisy Goodwill Flett is a subtle but affecting portrait of an everywoman reflecting on an unconventional life. What transforms this seemingly ordinary tale is the richness of Daisy's vividly described inner life--from her earliest memories of her adoptive mother to her awareness of impending death.

For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

About this title

Review

This fictionalized autobiography of Daisy Goodwill Flett, captured in Daisy's vivacious yet reflective voice, has been winning over readers since its publication in 1995, when it won the Pulitzer Prize. After a youth marked by sudden death and loss, Daisy escapes into conventionality as a middle-class wife and mother. Years later she becomes a successful garden columnist and experiences the kind of awakening that thousands of her contemporaries in mid-century yearned for but missed in alcoholism, marital infidelity and bridge clubs. The events of Daisy's life, however, are less compelling than her rich, vividly described inner life--from her memories of her adoptive mother to her awareness of impending death. Shields' sensuous prose and her deft characterizations make this, her sixth novel, her most successful yet.

From the Back Cover

Who is the real Daisy Goodwill? In this miniaturist masterpiece, Carol Shields pieces together one woman’s story, from its dramatic beginning in a Manitoba kitchen at the turn of the last century to its closing chapter in a Florida hospital in the early nineties. Drifting through the stages of childhood, romance, motherhood, and old age — and frequently crowded out of her own history by more flamboyant forebears, friends, and relations — Daisy emerges as a twentieth-century Everywoman and her life as a diary of this “mean old sentimental century.”

About this edition

• Publisher: Penguin Classics
• Publication date: 2008
• ISBN 10: 0143105507
• ISBN 13: 9780143105503
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 304