Book description
A wife and mother, whose spirit has been crushed, finds release from
her extraordinary pain in the most unlikely place. The young victim of
a humiliating seduction (which involves reading Housman in the nude)
finds an unusual way to get her own back and move on. An older woman,
dying of cancer, weaves a poisonous story to save her life. Other
stories uncover the 'deep holes' in marriage and their consequences,
the dangerous intimacy of girls and the cruelty of children. The long
title story follows Sophia Kovalevsky, a late nineteenth-century
Russian emigree and mathematical genius, as she takes a fateful winter
journey that begins with a visit to her lover on the Riviera, and ends
in Sweden, where she is a professor at the only university willing to
hire a woman to teach her subject.
Alice Munro takes on complex, even harrowing emotions and events,
and renders them into stories that surprise, amaze and shed light on
the unpredictable ways we accommodate to what happens in our lives.
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.
