The Diviners

The culmination of the Manawaka cycle, and Laurence's final novel, The Diviners is an epic tour de force. It is the story of Morag Gunn, an independent woman who refuses to abandon her search for love. We follow her from her lonely childhood in a small town on the Canadian prairie through her demeaning marriage and escape from it into writing, fiction, and finally back to rural Canada, where she faces a different challenge - the necessity to understand, and let go of, the daughter she loves. Throughout, Morag is forced to test her strength against the world - and at last achieves the life she had determined would be hers. In Morag Gunn, Laurence has created a figure whose experience emerges as that of all dispossessed people in search of their birthright, and one who survives as an inspirational symbol of courage and endurance.