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.