The Diviners

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.