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Winner of the Man Booker International Prize for 2009, Alice Munro is the author of eleven collections of stories, most recently The View from Castle Rock, and a novel, Lives of Girls and Women. She has received many awards and prizes, including three of Canada's Governor General's Literary Awards and two Giller Prizes, the Rea Award for the Short Story, the Lannan Literary Award, the W.H. Smith Book Award in the UK, the National Book Critics Circle Award in the US, and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize for The Beggar Maid. Her stories have appeared in the New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly, the Paris Review, and other publications, and her collections have been translated into thirteen languages. She lives with her husband in Clinton, Ontario, near Lake Huron in Canada.
Reading these 11 spellbinding stories is like having a floodlight switched on. They deal with small town and rural communities where the rhythm of life may be simple but emotions run strong and deep. Sexual, parental, and Platonic love are portrayed with unsentimental clarity and skill. The story 'Miles City, Montana', 11 pages long, tells of a death by drowning, witnessed by the narrator as a child; and the near death by drowning of the adult narrator's daughter. It analyses the quality of memory, the hypocrisy of marriage, the lies we tell ourselves to sustain self-belief and the yawning disparity between children's trust and adults' ability to deserve that trust. And that's just a crude diagram of what that story begins to do. Review by Jane Rogers, whose novels include 'Island' (Kirkus UK)
