The stone angel

This first of the five "Manawaka novels" (set in the fictional prairie town of Manawaka), the story of Hagar Shipley -- whose rigid pride costs her everything she loves -- has been taught in high school curricula in Canada for over twenty-five years and has never gone out of print. As the novel opens, the 90-year-old Hagar discovers that her middle-aged son Marvin and his fussy wife Doris intend to place her in a nursing home. Determined not to bend to anyone else’s will, she ponders the circuitous path that has led her to the house she shares with them in Vancouver and plots her escape, ultimately spending a wild, hallucinatory night in a deserted canning factory.