The Stone Diaries (Pulitzer Prize Winner) [B1013]

1995 PB Penguin reprint of the 1995 original, in nice clean condition. 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. From the back: "From her calamitous birth in Manitoba in 1905 to her journey with her father to Indiana, throughout her years as a wife, mother, and widow, Daisy Stone Goodwill has struggled to understand her place in her own life. Now she listens, she observes, and, through sheer force of imagination, she becomes a witness of her own life: her birth, her death, and the troubling misconnections she discovers in between. With irony and humor, Carol Shields weaves together the poignant story of this twentieth-century pilgrim in search of herself, and in doing so she creates a story that is a paradigm of the unsettled decades of our era. "Bittersweet, beautifully written deliciously unclassifiable, blatantly intelligent and subtly subversive... The Stone Diaries chips away at our most cherished, comforting beliefs about the immutability of facts and fate."-San Francisco Chronicle."

From many recent Amazon/GoodReads reviews: "Felt like a real life. Really brilliant."; "What a rare thrill, early in a novel, to feel that little thought bubble form over you that says, 'I think I'm reading one of the best books I've ever come across!' The book is a treasure: emotionally rich, genuinely surprising in its architecture as well as in its details, often funny and just as often sad but never cheaply so on either count. Beautiful."; "This life of an ordinary woman is told beautifully. I was never bored, despite the lack of excitement, and the ending really made me feel genuinely sad and lonely even though you know it's coming the whole way through."