‘Alice Munro has a strong claim to being the best fiction writer now working in North America.… She is speaking to you and to me right here, right now’
Jonathan Franzen On a clear day, you could see ‘America’ from Edinburgh’s Castle Rock – or so said Alice Munro’s great-great-great-grandfather, James Laidlaw, when he had drink taken. Then, in 1818, Laidlaw left the parish of 'no advantages', of banked Presbyterian emotions and uncanny tales – where, like his more famous cousin James Hogg, he was born and bred – and sailed to the new world with his family. This is the story of those shepherds from the Ettrick Valley and their descendants, among them the author herself. They were a Spartan lot, who kept to themselves; showing off was frowned on, and fear was commonplace, at least for females…
But opportunities present themselves for two strong-minded women in a ship’s close quarters; a father dies, and a baby vanishes en route from Illinois to Canada; another story hints at incest; childhood is short and hazardous. This is family history where imperfect recollections blur into fiction, where the past shows through the present like the tracks of a glacier on a geological map. First love flowers under an apple tree while lust rears its head in a barn; a restless mother with ideas beyond her station declines painfully; a father farms fox fur and turkeys; a clever girl escapes to college and then into a hasty marriage. Beneath the ordinary landscape there’s a different story – evocative, frightening, sexy, unexpected, gripping. Alice Munro tells it like no other.
Author ProfileAlice Munro is the author of
The Beggar Maid (shortlisted for the Booker Prize) a novel, and several outstanding collections of stories, including
Open Secrets (winner of the WHSmith Literary Award),
Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage and most recentlythe acclaimed
Runaway. Her work appears regularly in
The New Yorker and she is a winner of the Giller Prize and the Governor General's Prize in her native Canada.
ReviewsThis is a rare and fascinating work,
A stunning achievement,A collection that sees her delving even deeper and with glittering expertise into a fictional terrain she has made her own for 40 years now,The power of Munro’s storytelling never falters. It is almost otiose to add to the clamour of praise for her writing, but necessary, nevertheless.
This is a remarkable book,If there is one writer who proves that the short story should never be deemed the uninspiring younger sibling of the novel, it is Munro,This is a deeply moving and contemplative book. If it is a valediction, then it is a magnificent one,Mesmerising and cleverly interlinked, these stories are well balanced – neither overly inventive nor stolidly factual. Ms Munro’s light touch and her sensitive embellishment of the truth result in a book that is illuminated by the patterns of life repeating themselves over the years,One of my very favourite writers,Munro’s genius, as she imagines what is going on inside the closed worlds of individual lives, has to do with her exceptional openness to other people’s words, to the shapes of their understanding and their ways of seeing
