A brilliant new collection of stories from one of the
most acclaimed and beloved writers of our time.
Alice Munro’s peerless ability to give us the essence of a
life in often brief but always spacious and timeless stories
is once again everywhere apparent in this brilliant new
collection. In story after story, she illumines the moment a
life is forever altered by a chance encounter or an action
not taken, or by a simple twist of fate that turns a person
out of his or her accustomed path and into a new way of
being or thinking. A poet, finding herself in alien
territory at her first literary party, is rescued by a
seasoned newspaper columnist, and is soon hurtling across
the continent, young child in tow, toward a hoped-for but
completely unplanned meeting. A young soldier, returning to
his fiancée from the Second World War, steps off the train
before his stop and onto the farm of another woman,
beginning a life on the move. A wealthy young woman having
an affair with the married lawyer hired by her father to
handle his estate comes up with a surprising way to deal
with the blackmailer who finds them out.
While most of these stories take place in Munro’s home
territory—the small Canadian towns around Lake Huron—the
characters sometimes venture to the cities, and the book
ends with four pieces set in the area where she grew up, and
in the time of her own childhood: stories “autobiographical
in feeling, though not, sometimes, entirely so in fact.” A
girl who can’t sleep imagines night after wakeful night that
she kills her beloved younger sister. A mother snatches up
her child and runs for dear life when a crazy woman comes
into her yard.
Suffused with Munro’s clarity of vision and her unparalleled
gift for storytelling, these tales about departures and
beginnings, accidents and dangers, and outgoings and
homecomings both imagined and real, paint a radiant,
indelible portrait of how strange, perilous, and
extraordinary ordinary life can be.
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