The Stone Diaries

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Carol Shields (1935–2000) is the author of Dressing Up for the Carnival; Larry’s Party, which won the Orange Prize; and The Stone Diaries, which won the 1995 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her other novels and short story collections include The Republic of Love, Happenstance, Swann, The Orange Fish, Various Miracles, The Box Garden, and Small Ceremonies.

Penelope Lively is the author of numerous award-winning novels, including The Photograph, Consequences, and the Booker Prize — winning Moon Tiger. She lives in London.

The best fiction surprises — and withholds. Each time that I read The Stone Diaries I see it differently. It is a story, first of all — the story of a woman, Daisy Goodwill, later Daisy Goodwill Flett. It is also many stories — those of her family and her friends. You read it first as such, drawn in at once by the compelling opening pages, and then keen to know what is going to happen — to Daisy, to the rest of them. Subsequently it becomes a view of how one woman — many women — lived in the twentieth century, what they expected and what was expected of them. It can be seen as a discussion of the nature of evidence — the way in which there is no single truth about anyone’s life, but as many truths as there are observers.

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