Book description
Alice Munro captures the essence of life in her brilliant new
collection of stories. Moments of change, chance encounters, the twist
of fate that leads a person to a new way of thinking or being: the
stories in Dear Life build to form a radiant, indelible
portrait of just how dangerous and strange ordinary life can be.
Many of these stories are grounded in Munro's home territory - the
small Canadian towns around Lake Huron - but there are departures too.
A poet, finding herself in alien territory at her first literary
party, is reescued by a seasoned newspaper editor, and is soon
hurtling across the continent, young child in tow, towards 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.
The book ends with four powerful pieces, 'autobiographical in
feeling', set during the time of Munro's own childhood, in the area
where she grew up. Munro describes this quartet as 'not quite stories'
but 'the first and last - and the closest - things I have to say about
my own life'. Suffused with Munro's clarity of vision and her
unparalleled gift for storytelling, these and the other stories in
Dear Life are cause for celebration.
Alice Munro was born in 1931 and is the author of twelve collections
of stories, most recently
Too Much Happiness
, 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 WHSmith Book Award
in the UK, the National Book Critics Circle Award in the US, was
shortlisted for the Booker Prize for
The Beggar Maid
, and has been awarded the Man Booker International Prize 2009 for her
overall contribution to fiction on the world stage. Her stories have
appeared in
The New Yorker
,
Atlantic Monthly,
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.
