Diviners, The

Description: Morag Gunn is a writer in her mid-forties who lives in a riverside farm in East Ontario. Her eighteen-year-old daughter is suffering from a profound loneliness that she is struggling to understand, causing Morag to contemplate her own past. Through a series of flashbacks she reviews the painful and exhilarating moments from her earlier life: her childhood on the social margins of the small prairie town of Manawaka; her escape from a demeaning marriage into writing fiction; and her travels to England, Scotland and finally back to Canada, where she faces her most difficult challenge - the necessity to understand, and let go of, the daughter she loves. First published in 1974, The Diviners is an evocative, moving exploration of one woman's search for identity. Review: PRAISE FOR MARGARET LAURENCE: 'Ambitious and compelling' New York Times Book Review. 'Laurence remains, for many readers, the defining conscious of 20th-century Canadian fiction' Irish Times. 'Poetic and muscular ... Her heroine is one of the more humane, unglorified, unpolemical, believeable women to have appeared in fiction' New Yorker. 'It's hard to think of a contemporary novel more moving and more triumphant than The Diviners' Sara Maitland. Author Biography: Margaret Laurence (1926-1987) grew up in the small prairie town of Neepawa, Manitoba, Canada. Recognised as one of the greatest Canadian writers, her masterwork is the Manawaka sequence of five novels: five novels of which The Diviners is the final in the series. The first, The Stone Angel, A Jest of God and The Fire-Dwellers are all available from Apollo. A vivid portrait of a woman coming to terms with life's disappointments, by one of Canada's leading novelists.