WINNER OF THE NOBEL PRIZE(R) IN LITERATURE 2013
In eight new stories, a master of the form extends and magnifies her
great themes--the vagaries of love, the passion that leads down
unexpected paths, the chaos hovering just under the surface of things,
and the strange, often comical desires of the human heart.
Time stretches out in some of the stories: a man and a woman look back
forty years to the summer they met--the summer, as it turns out, that
the true nature of their lives was revealed. In others time is
telescoped: a young girl finds in the course of an evening that the
mother she adores, and whose fluttery sexuality she hopes to emulate,
will not sustain her--she must count on herself.
Some choices are made--in a will, in a decision to leave home--with
irrevocable and surprising consequences. At other times disaster is
courted or barely skirted: when a mother has a startling dream about her
baby; when a woman, driving her grandchildren to visit the lakeside
haunts of her youth, starts a game that could have dangerous
consequences. The rich layering that gives Alice Munro's work so strong
a sense of life is particularly apparent in the title story, in which
the death of a local optometrist brings an entire town into focus--from
the preadolescent boys who find his body, to the man who probably killed
him, to the woman who must decide what to do about what she might know.
Large, moving, profound--these are stories that extend the limits of
fiction.
