The Diviners - Softcover

Laurence, Margaret

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0860688186 ISBN 13: 9780860688181

Publisher: Virago Press Ltd, 1989

Synopsis

The culmination and completion of Margaret Laurence’s celebrated Manawaka cycle, The Diviners is an epic novel.

This is the powerful story of an independent woman who refuses to abandon her search for love. For Morag Gunn, growing up in a small Canadian prairie town is a toughening process – putting distance between herself and a world that wanted no part of her. But in time, the aloneness that had once been forced upon her becomes a precious right – relinquished only in her overwhelming need for love. Again and again, Morag is forced to test her strength against the world – and finally achieves the life she had determined would be hers.

The Diviners has been acclaimed by many critics as the outstanding achievement of Margaret Laurence’s writing career. In Morag Gunn, Laurence has created a figure whose experience emerges as that of all dispossessed people in search of their birthright, and one who survives as an inspirational symbol of courage and endurance.

The Diviners received the Governor General’s Award for Fiction for 1974.

About this title

From the Back Cover

The culmination of the Manawaka cycle, and Laurence's final novel, The Diviners is an epic tour de force. It is the story of Morag Gunn, an independent woman who refuses to abandon her search for love. We follow her from her lonely childhood in a small town on the Canadian prairie through her demeaning marriage and escape from it into writing, fiction, and finally back to rural Canada, where she faces a different challenge - the necessity to understand, and let go of, the daughter she loves. Throughout, Morag is forced to test her strength against the world - and at last achieves the life she had determined would be hers. In Morag Gunn, Laurence has created a figure whose experience emerges as that of all dispossessed people in search of their birthright, and one who survives as an inspirational symbol of courage and endurance.

About the Author

Margaret Laurence was born in Neepawa, Manitoba, in 1926. Upon graduation from Winnipeg’s United College in 1947, she took a job as a reporter for the Winnipeg Citizen.

From 1950 until 1957 Laurence lived in Africa, the first two years in Somalia, the next five in Ghana, where her husband, a civil engineer, was working. She translated Somali poetry and prose during this time, and began her career as a fiction writer with stories set in Africa.

When Laurence returned to Canada in 1957, she settled in Vancouver, where she devoted herself to fiction with a Ghanaian setting: in her first novel, This Side Jordan, and in her first collection of short fiction, The Tomorrow-Tamer. Her two years in Somalia were the subject of her memoir, The Prophet’s Camel Bell.

Separating from her husband in 1962, Laurence moved to England, which became her home for a decade, the time she devoted to the creation of five books about the fictional town of Manawaka, patterned after her birthplace, and its people: The Stone Angel, A Jest of God, The Fire-Dwellers, A Bird in the House, and The Diviners.

Laurence settled in Lakefield, Ontario, in 1974. She complemented her fiction with essays, book reviews, and four children’s books. Her many honours include two Governor General’s Awards for Fiction and more than a dozen honorary degrees.

Margaret Laurence died in Lakefield, Ontario in 1987.

About this edition

• Publisher: Virago Press Ltd
• Publication date: 1989
• ISBN 10: 0860688186
• ISBN 13: 9780860688181
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 406