Margaret Laurence · 1964 · exile

Margaret Laurence's 1964 novel, the first of the Manawaka books. Hagar Shipley is ninety, losing her memory and about to be put in a home, and runs away instead. The present tense of the book covers about three days; the rest of it is eighty years of a woman whose pride cost her nearly everything and who will not admit it until the last pages.

1. 1
   Manawaka

   A prairie town Laurence built out of Neepawa. Hagar is the daughter of a proud Scottish storekeeper, sent to finishing school and forbidden to teach - and the stone angel over her mother's grave opens the book.

2. 2
   The Shipley farm

   She marries Bram Shipley because her father says he is a nobody, and her father never speaks to her again - twenty-four years on a failing farm with a man she is ashamed of and will not leave until she does.

3. 3
   Vancouver

   She takes John and goes west to work as a housekeeper for Mr Oatley, and does not go back until Bram is dying - and loses her savings in 1929, and then loses John on a railway trestle in Manawaka.

4. 4
   Shadow Point

   Ninety years old and running from Silverthreads nursing home, she gets off a bus, cannot climb back up, and spends a night in an abandoned cannery drinking wine with a stranger who tells her about his dead son.

5. 5
   Vancouver

   Recaptured and taken to hospital, she does two generous things in as many days - helps the girl in the next bed, and tells Marvin he was always her favourite, which is a lie and the best thing she ever does.