The Stone Diaries

The Stone Diaries is a novel by the Canadian writer Carol Shields, published in 1993.

The book is the fictional autobiography of Daisy Goodwill Flett, whose mother dies in childbirth in 1905 and who is raised for the first eleven years of her life by a neighbour before her life takes its next shape. Shields follows her through the events an ordinary life is made of: growing up, a first marriage, motherhood, a career, the death of people she loves, and a long old age in a Florida nursing home. The story is told in ten chapters, each dealing with a period of her life, and the narration is deliberately unstable; at points the accounts come from her children, her friends and the people around her, and the reader has to decide how much of Daisy's own version is reliable.

Shields was a Canadian novelist and short-story writer, and the book is the one for which she is best known, the one that made her name outside Canada and the one that her readers usually mention first.