Stone Diaries

London, United Kingdom: Fourth Estate Ltd, 1994. Trade Paperback. Very Good. 5" x 8. 360 pages. Slight spine cock.The Stone Diaries won the 1995 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction as well as The National Book Critics Circle Award and the Governor General's Award of Canada. Daisy Stone Goodwill, born in Manitoba in 1905 spends a long life as wife, mother and widow, struggling to understand her place in her own life. With irony and humor, the author weaves together the poignant story of a twentieth-century pilgrim in search of herself, and in doing so she has created a story that is a paradigm of the unsettled decades of our era. This is fictionalized autobiography of Daisy Goodwill Flett. 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. Includes a center section of black and white photgraphs that every diary should have.