The novel, "The Diviners", was written by Margaret Laurence in 1974. Laurence is a well-known Canadian novelist and short story writer. She was born in 1926 in Neepawa, Manitoba and died in Lakefield near Peterborough, Ontario in 1987. Laurence was diagnosed with lung cancer, and rather than becoming what she believed would be a burden to her family, she committed suicide.
The novel itself deals with the protagonist Morag Gunn, a successful forty-seven-year-old novelist who has bought a farm in rural Ontario, where she is trying to write a novel. The discovery of some old snapshots of her as a child sets off a series of memories. The Diviners is a story of Morag's life, told in chronologically arranged flashbacks and events in her present. Morag's parents died when she was only five years old. After her parents' death she was brought to a small Manitoba town of Manawaka. There she was raised by her adopted-father Christie Logan, the despised town scavenger, and his inactive wife Prin. Both did not have much money and they lived under modest and poor circumstances. Morag always felt ashamed in public and especially in school, because of Christie's job as a garbage man and his unkempt appearance and Prin's overweight. .
Many kids at school made fun of Morag, because she wore cheap and old-fashioned clothes. But Christie and Prin never hit or harmed Morag. They loved her as if she were their own daughter. However in privacy, Morag admired Christie's wisdom and she enjoyed listening to his stories he was telling her. .
The snapshots of "The Diviners" reveal Morag's past. The entire novel deals with her childhood in a small Manitoba town and later on as a young adult in Vancouver, where she decides to study. Morag was a very good student at school and she always wanted to leave her home town. In Manitoba she learned Jules (Skinner) Tonnerre, an Indian who was discriminated by the town's inhabitants at that time.