Penguin_Where-to-Start-With-Alice-Munro-1800×1200-1

Reading lists

Where to start reading Alice Munro’s books

A gif of a birthday cake with '40' candles atop, with flickering flames.

Classics-to-read-by-Age_40s_Desktop_Hero_Penguin.gif

20 books everyone should read in their forties

The Moons of Jupiter

2021 sees all of Alice Munro's backlist reissued in a new, modern look. These editions will appeal to a broad range of literary readers

Only a few writers continue to create those full-bodied miniature universes of the old school.  Some of her short stories are so ample and fulfilling that they feel like novels.  They present whole landscapes and cultures, who families of characters

The writer's questioning memory gives us sharp flashes of reality that are so vividly recalled they permit us to live another life for a moment.

Witty, subtle, passionate, The Moons of Jupiter is exceptionally knowledgeable about the content and movement - the entanglements and entailments - of individual human feeling. And the knowledge it offers can't be looked up elsewhere

Munro is in a class of her own.... No other writer working today is able to invest the humble story with more power, grace or breadth.... Munro has been compared to Chekhov... She has the haunting lyricism and the indulgent wisdom to qualify.

How does one know when one is in the grip of art, a major talent? One feels it in the assurance, the sensibility behind every line of a work; one knows its presence as much from what is withheld as from what is given or explained. It is art that speaks from the pages of Alice Munro's stories.

Alice Munro was born in 1931 and was the author of thirteen collections of stories and the novel, Lives of Girls and Women. She 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 Who Do You Think You Are? (previously published as The Beggar Maid), and was awarded the Man Booker International Prize 2009 for her overall contribution to fiction on the world stage, and in 2013 she won the Nobel Prize in Literature. Her stories have appeared in the New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly, Paris Review and other publications, and her collections have been translated into thirteen languages. Alice Munro died in 2024.

THE WINNER OF THE NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE 
 
The characters who populate an Alice Munro story live and breathe. Passions hopelessly conceived, affections betrayed, marriages made and broken: the joys, fears, loves and awakenings of women echo throughout these twelve unforgettable stories, laying bare the unexceptional and yet inescapable pain of human contact.

Dance of the Happy Shades

The finest writer of short stories working in the English language today

A remarkable writer whose major characters emerge in shining clarity... A major talent is at work here

Munro's power of analysis, of sensations and thoughts is almost Proustian in its sureness

Read not more than one of her stories a day, and allow them to work their spell: they are made to last

The particular brilliance of Alice Munro is that in range and depth her short stories are almost novels

Virginia Woolf described George Eliot as one of the few writers 'for grown-up people.' The same might today, and with equal justice, be said of Alice Munro

She is our Chekhov, and is going to outlast most of her contemporaries

Discover Alice Munro&rsquo;s first mesmerising and atmospheric short story collection. 
 
&lsquo;A remarkable writer whose major characters emerge in shining clarity... A major talent is at work here&rsquo; Los Angeles Times 
 
Alice Munro's territory is the farms and semi-rural towns of south-western Ontario. 
In these dazzling stories she deals with the self-discovery of adolescence, the joys and pains of love and the despair and guilt of those caught in a narrow existence. And in sensitively exploring the lives of ordinary men and women, she makes us aware of the universal nature of their fears, sorrows, and aspirations. 
 
Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature 
 
Winner of the Man Booker International Prize 200

The Progress of Love

Whatever it is that makes some writing come alive in every phrase and sentence, Alice Munro has it... I wouldn't willingly miss one of her stories

Munro has been compared with Proust, shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and remains - though dazzling - quite unperturbed and unaffected, her writing smooth and supple

A work of great brilliance and depth... Munro's power of analysis, of sensation, and thoughts, is almost Proustian in its sureness

Only a few writers continue to create those full-bodied miniature universes of the old school. Some of her short stories are so ample and fulfilling that they feel like novels. They present whole landscapes and cultures, whole families of characters

In range and depth her short stories are almost novels...complete, complex, and brilliantly structured... One of the finest living short-story writers

One of the foremost contemporary practitioners of the short story

Like her similarly gifted contemporaries Peter Taylor, William Trevor, Edna O'Brien...Alice Munro writes stories that have the density - moral, emotional, sometimes historical - of other writers' novels

A...writer of great sensitivity and delicacy. Her new collection of stories show no falling off in her gift for putting the ordinary into a sharp, clear persepective, seem very near and also very far away

She draws her readers irresistably into the undergrowth of other people's private lives

These dazzling and utterly satisfying stories explore varieties and degrees of love - filial, platonic, sexual, parental, and imagined - in the lives of apparently ordinary folk. 
 
&lsquo;Complete, complex, and brilliantly structured&rsquo; Daily Telegraph 
 
In fact, Munro's characters pulse with idiosyncratic life. Under the polished surface of these unsentimental dispatches from the small-town and rural front lies a strong undertow of violence and sexuality, repressed until something snaps, with extraordinary force in some of the stories, sadly and strangely in others. 
 
Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature 
 
Winner of the Man Booker International Prize 2009

The View from Castle Rock

Alice Munro turns to her family for inspiration; and what follows is a fictionalised, brilliantly imagined version of the past. 
 
&lsquo;One of my very favourite writers&rsquo; Claire Tomalin 
 
From her ancestors' view from Edinburgh's Castle Rock in the eighteenth century to her parents' thwarted ambitions in Ontario, and her own awakening in 1950s Canada, Munro effortlessly weaves fact and myth to create an epic story of past and present, proving that fiction has much to tell us about life. 
 
Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature 
 
Winner of the Man Booker International Prize 2009

Too Much Happiness

She writes with a beautiful clarity, an elemental humanity and a marvellous, limpid, funny, apprehension of what goes on

Some of the most honest, intuitive and exacting fiction, long or short, of our time

Munro's bold, unflinching narratives have taken the short story places many a novelist has feared to tread... That she does this in a style both calm and deliberate, fluid yet tightly controlled, stark yet compassionate, is what makes her insights into the human condition so profound

Written with veteran assurance, brimming with intensely believable characters and rich social detail, these dispatches from the most unsparing reaches of Munro's imagination confirm her acclaimed place on the highest ground of contemporary fiction

Alice Munro commands enormous respect and almost uncritical adoration from her readers

Too Much Happiness is her 11th collection, and as brilliant and surprising as any ... who could be better?

She has the lightest of touches, with every word seeming entirely necessary, but nothing set in stone....remarkable collection

Munro is famously hard to write about, in part because she's the opposite of the Borges character who joked about belonging not to art but to the history of art. Far from hanging on to the gates of literature, her stories create a powerful illusion of bringing their readers up against unmediated life; and life isn't penetrable by the normal procedures of book reviewing. Is Too Much Happiness as substantial a collection as Runaway (2004) or Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage (2001)? The only sensible answer is to recommend buying all three

As strong and vivid as ever... a gift for the humane observation and the specific, plausible detail

Assured collection from the short-story queen

These are beguiling, provocative stories about manipulative men and the women who outwit them. 
&lsquo;Brimming with intensely believable characters and rich social detail&rsquo; Sunday Times 
 
A wife and mother whose spirit has been crushed finds release from her extraordinary pain in the most unlikely of places. The young victim of a humiliating seduction 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. 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 Nobel Prize in Literature 
 
Winner of the Man Booker International Prize 2009

Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage

In these stories lives come into focus through single events or sudden memories which bring the past bubbling to the surface. 
 
&lsquo;No one could possibly dispute Munro's greatness&rsquo; Daily Mail 
 
The past, as Alice Munro's characters discover, is made up not only of what is remembered, but also what isn't. The past is there, just out of the picture, but if memories haven't been savoured, recalled in the mind, and boxed away, it's as if they have never been - until a moment when the pieces of the jigsaw re-form suddenly, sometimes pleasurably but more often painfully. 
Women look back at their young selves, at first marriages made when they were naive and trusting, at husbands and their difficult, demanding little ways in a collection filled with both underlying heartbreak and hope. 
 
Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature 
 
Winner of the Man Booker International Prize 2009

Who Do You Think You Are?

**A BBC BETWEEN THE COVERS PICK** 
 
Previously published as 'The Beggar Maid', Alice Munro's wonderful collection of stories reads like a novel, following Rose's life as she moves away from her impoverished roots and forges her own path in the world. 
 
Born into the back streets of a small Canadian town, Rose battled incessantly with her practical and shrewd stepmother, Flo, who cowed her with tales of her own past and warnings of the dangerous world outside. But Rose was ambitious - she won a scholarship and left for Toronto where she married Patrick. She was his Beggar Maid, 'meek and voluptuous, with her shy white feet', and he was her knight, content to sit and adore her. 
 
'A work of great brilliance and depth... almost Proustian in its sureness' New Statesman 
Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature 
 
Winner of the Man Booker International Prize 2009

The stories are absolutely wonderful...every word she writes is interesting

A work of great brilliance and depth- Munro's power of analysis, of sensations and thoughts, is almost Proustian in its sureness

Alice Munro captures a kaleidoscope of lights and depths-she manages to reproduce the vibrant practice of life while scrutinizing the workings of her own narrative art-an exhilarating collection

Whether Alice Munro's The Beggar Maid is a collection of stories or a new kind of novel I'm not quite sure, but whatever it is, it's wonderful. The psychological precision...the startling twists, the unexpected leaps in time, the transformation of familiar characters make the book what books ought to be, a little wild, a little mysterious

Friend of My Youth

Read not more than one of her stories a day, and allow them to work their spell: they are made last

Alice Munro's stories, Friend of My Youth, are wonderful: intricate, deep, full of absorbing and funny detail, and opening into painful and tender memories with cunningly concealed skill

Brilliant at evoking life's diversity and unpredictability...an unrivalled chronicler of human nature under a vast span of aspects, moods and pressures

One of the best short-story writers alive

Munro is unfaltering at changes of mood, moments when sweetness tips over into mistrust, or mockery, or disgust

It is a collection that attests, once again, to Ms Munro's complete fluency in the short-story form, her emergence as one of the most eloquent and gifted writers of contemporary fiction

Read Alice Munro&rsquo;s dark and powerful exploration of the human heart in this ten-story collection. 
 
&lsquo;Brilliant at evoking life's diversity and unpredictability...an unrivalled chronicler of human nature under a vast span of aspects, moods, and pressures&rsquo; Sunday Times 
 
A woman haunted by dreams of her dead mother. An adulterous couple stepping over the line where the initial excitement ends, and the pain begins. A widow visiting a Scottish village in search of her husband's past - and instead, discovering unsettling truths about a total stranger. The ten stories in this collection not only astonish and delight but also convey the unspoken mysteries at the heart of all human experience. 
 
Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature 
 
Winner of the Man Booker International Prize 2009

Selected Stories

Volume One 1968-1994

Munro is a great realist, and her powers come from her sense of the way in which communities – especially small, socially anxious, limited ones – construct and guard their reality.

One of the most esteemed writers in the world....Few writers capture the moral ambiguities, murkiness, messiness - and joy - of relationships with as much empathy and grace as Munro

Her work is practically perfect. Any writer has to gawk when reading her because her work is very subtle and precise

The best short story writer alive... Munro can pack more into one of her stories - more subtlety, more grace, more tender twists of the human heart - than many novelists do in a lifetime's oeuvre

One of the world's best living short-story writers...say that she has made the short story her own and reinvigorated it somehow falls short - she has reinvented it

Munro's stories enact what can only be called a sort of magic

Stories that mirror reality -- in all its erratic unpredictability -- so convincingly that you can almost forget the skill with which they're created

In these stories, fiction saves lives. Imagination kills. Tales break bones

Munro can be harrowing to read; she can make your gums tingle, make you moan, or make you cry...really, who could be better?

Covering the first half of Nobel Prize winner Alice Munro's career, these are some of the best, most touching and powerful short stories ever written. 
 
&lsquo;Munro can pack more into one of her stories - more subtlety, more grace, more tender twists of the human heart - than many novelists do&rsquo; Independent 
 
This first-ever selection of Alice Munro's stories sums up her genius. Her territory is the secrets that cackle beneath the façade of everyday lives, the pain and promises, loves and fears of apparently ordinary men and women whom she renders extraordinary and unforgettable. 
 
This volume brings together the best of Munro's stories, from 1968 through to 1994. The second selected volume of her stories, 1995-2009 is also published by Vintage Classics. 
 
&lsquo;Few writers capture the moral ambiguities, murkiness, messiness - and joy - of relationships with as much empathy and grace as Munro&rsquo; Guardian 
 
Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature 
 
Winner of the Man Booker International Prize 2009

Selected Stories Volume Two: 1995-2009

Covering the second half of Nobel Prize winner Alice Munro's career, these are some of the best, most touching and powerful short stories ever written. 
 
'Munro is still one of our most fearless explorers of the human being' The Times 
 
Spanning her last five collections and bringing together her finest work from the past fifteen years, this new selection of Alice Munro's stories infuses everyday lives with a wealth of nuance and insight. 
 
Beautifully observed and remarkably crafted, written with emotion and empathy, these stories are nothing short of perfection. A masterclass in the genre, from an author who deservedly lays claim to being one of the major fiction writers of our time. 
 
Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature 
 
Winner of the Man Booker International Prize 200

Open Secrets

Brilliant at evoking life's diversity and unpredictability, [Alice Munro is] an unrivalled chronicler of human nature

A superb collection... Marriage, gambles, disappearances, motiveless vandalism - it is the stuff of unremarkable lives, conveyed in a remarkable fashion

Alice Munro excites the writer in me - there is something new to learn from her in every sentence

Open Secrets by the wonderful Alice Munro, is a collection of short stories, written with exquisite style

Alice Munro writes almost perfect stories: beautifully cadenced, both wildly funny and gravely sad... Like crumpled balls of paper, they unfold in our minds after reading them

A book that dazzles with its faith in language and life

Open Secrets consists of eight luminous and poetic stories, each one as rich as a novel. 
 
'A superb collection... Marriage, gambles, disappearances, motiveless vandalism - it is the stuff of unremarkable lives, conveyed in a remarkable fashion' Independent 
 
Ranging from the 1850s through two world wars to the present, and from Canada to Brisbane, the Balkans and the Somme, these dazzling stories reveal the secrets of unconventional women who refuse to be contained. 
 
Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature 
 
Winner of the Man Booker International Prize 2009

Runaway

Newly re-jacketed for a new generation, the bestselling collection by the greatest short story writer in the world and winner of the Man Booker International Prize.

The matchless Munro makes art out of everyday lives in this exquisite short story collection. 
 
**WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY JONATHAN FRANZEN** 
 
Here are men and women of wildly different times and circumstances, their lives made vividly palpable by the nuance and empathy of Munro's writing. Runaway is about the power and betrayals of love, about lost children, lost chances. There is pain and desolation beneath the surface, like a needle in the heart, which makes these stories more powerful and compelling than anything she has written before. 
 
&lsquo;The way to do it justice is to read it. Read Munro!&rsquo; Jonathan Franzen 
 
&lsquo;These stories are breathtaking - they leave you winded with their toughness and brilliance&rsquo; Guardian 
 
Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature 
 
Winner of the Man Booker International Prize 2009

Munro is one of my all-time favourite writers. She seems to really see people, like a mind reader who knows what her characters are thinking before they do do, and tells their stories with simplicity and empathy.

Runaway is so good I don't want to talk about it. Quotation can't do the book justice, and neither can synopsis. The way to do it justice is to read it. Read Munro! Read Munro!

Millions of words have been spilt in attempts to tell us exactly what it means to be human. In Runaway, Munro performs that very miracle

A beautiful, echoing collection, and a demonstration of perfected and unflinching form

These stories are breathtaking - they leave you winded with their toughness and brilliance

She is a sculptor of the human condition: nothing more and nothing less than an artist

It is almost impossible to describe their unforced exactness, their unrushed economy... Munro has a genius for evoking the particular and peculiar atmosphere of relationships, their unspoken pressures and expectations

Her genius cannot be denied... The contemporary writer I admire above all others

Munro is routinely called one of the finest living writers.You can turn to any of the stories in Runaway and see why

Runaway may well be the synthesizing work of one of literature's keenest investigators into the human soul

The great Alice Munro proves again why short story writers bow down to her

Lives of Girls and Women

Moving, ribald and semi-autobiographical, Lives of Girls and Women is the only novel from Alice Munro, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature

I still feel that Alice Munro is mine. I am the perfect audience for her brand of quiet, seething feminism

Munro is so good that one gropes for superlatives

Superb. Its dense weave of colour and texture offers manifold witty surprises and the poetry of place that is the hallmark of Munro’s stories

In Munro's work, nothing can be predicted. Emotions erupt. Preconceptions crumble. Surprises proliferate

Her prose is exact and unflinching, coolly anatomising vengeful grudges, dark crimes and curdled emotions

The Nobel laureate’s mastery of the miniature is clear in this early portrait of small-town life

She is one of the handful of writers, some living, most dead, whom I have in mind when I say that fiction is my religion

She knows us better than we know ourselves. She always has

Reading Munro's cut-crystal prose is unadulterated pleasure

A compelling portrait of the artist as a young girl

If you’ve not come across it before, grab a copy pronto

This book shows Munro’s gift for finding the extraordinary in the everyday

In the simplest of words, and with the greatest of power, she makes us see and hear an ‘unremarkable’ scene we will never forget

A subtle portrait of a mother and daughter growing into one another.

'Superb' Independent 
'Exact and unflinching' Guardian 
 
Catching frogs, grazing knees, singing songs to save England from Hitler - that was childhood for Del Jordan, and now she's impatient for more. 
 
More than she can find in the encyclopaedias sold by her mother, or in the half-understood innuendos dispensed by best friend Naomi, or in the whispers of boys during Friday night dances. 
 
Just like the girls in the movies, she wants to get started on real life. 
 
In her only novel, Alice Munro turns her eye to the frustrations, embarrassments, glee and bewilderment of adolescence, and to the brushes with sex, death, violence and birth that shape the lives of girls and women. 
 
'In Munro's work, nothing can be predicted. Emotions erupt. Preconceptions crumble. Surprises proliferate' Margaret Atwoo

Something I've Been Meaning to Tell You

**Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature** 
 
A remarkable early collection of stories by Alice Munro, the bestselling author of Dear Life, and one of the greatest fiction writers of our time.

She sets down the pains and pleasures of living in a spare, singing prose, not a word wasted

Munro is so good one gropes for superlatives

Alice Munro has a strong claim to being the best fiction writer now working in North America

Alice Munro is among the major writers of English fiction of our time

Discover Alice Munro&rsquo;s remarkable early stories. 
 
&lsquo;Alice Munro&rsquo;s stories are miraculous&rsquo; Sunday Times 
 
The sisters, mothers and daughters, aunts, grandmothers, and friends in these stories shimmer with hope and love, anger, and reconciliation, as they contend with their histories and their present, and what they can see of the future. 
 
Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature 
 
Winner of the Man Booker International Prize 2009

Dear Life

**Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature** 
 
The brilliant new collection of stories by the winner of the 2009 Man Booker International Prize

**WINNER OF THE NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE** 
 
**WINNER OF THE MAN BOOKER INTERNATIONAL PRIZE** 
 
Alice Munro captures the essence of life in her brilliant collection of short 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. 
 
&lsquo;She is so damn good&rsquo; Anne Enright 
 
&lsquo;Deep and surprising and unsparing&rsquo; Guardian

As rich and astonishing as anything she has ever done before

In this book Munro has laid bare the foundations of her fiction as never before. Lovers of her writing must hope this is not, in fact, her finale. But if it is, it’s spectacular

Another dazzling collection of short stories, provincial and universal in equal measure

A slight sense of withholding gives Munro's prose its gracefulness, and allows intimacy without danger. After many years, many collections and many wonderful stories, readers may feel they know everything about Alice Munro, especially as so many of her characters lead lives similar to her own. In fact, we know very little about her. This is one of the reasons readers become dizzy with love for Munro. This other reason is that she is so damn good

Alice Munro is one of our greatest living writers, and this new collection of stories…is essential reading for anyone who cares about literature, storytelling and language, or who savours the deep enjoyment of a writer at the height of her powers…These stories remind us of the world Munro was born into…And they remind us, therefore, how lucky we are to have Munro herself and her subtle, intelligent and true work

Told with magnificent understatement

Deceptively artless...Munro has no need for tricks; there is nothing strange. Just everyday life, in all its plain, abundant richness and sorrow

Alice Munro…can create a whole world in a short story – these stories are only 20 or 30 pages long, but they live in the mind like novels… These are stories about the stories we tell ourselves, and they are first rate

A quiet revelation... Dear Life is full of remarkable moments in ordinary lives and is imbued with an aching sadness

In this superb collection of short stories, the acclaimed Canadian writer shows repeatedly how apparently ordinary lives can be infused with dramatic intensity

A collection of truly beautiful short stories, perfectly crafted in a way that leaves no wanting feeling… Profound, poignant and undeniably powerful, this truly is the short story at its finest

A writer who has refined her remarkable talents over a long lifetime, a writer whose mastery of the craft has reached a level that her nickname, "Canada's Chekhov" feels emptied of all hyperbole… Beautifully written and ambitious in terms of form

[Munro] can create a whole world in a short story... These are stories about the stories we tell ourselves, and they are first rate

[Munro] really is the short story writer to beat... Munro has always been fascinated by those moments that tilt our world on its axis, as though the world really does turn on a kiss, but her brilliance lies in the psychological way that she convinces us of that fact

In crystalline prose, she illuminates her characters' hopes and longings

[Munro] has been compared to Chekhov and I'm only being slightly tongue in cheek when I say that the honour is entirely his. Dear Life is comprised of 13 rich and startling stories, a must read

I haven’t even finished all of Dear Life, but Alice Munro’s stories have lived with me for such a long time and with such quiet passion that I’m barely capable of explaining why

[Munro’s] talent is formidable but she has never been self-seeking: her short stories have a subtle, covert brilliance

These stories won’t give you easy moral comfort, but will stretch you. They’re moral in that they name things as they are

Dear Life is a dazzling portrait of ordinary existence which illustrates how seemingly insignificant meetings and moments can have a monumental impact

**Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature** 
 
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.

Family Furnishings (Storycuts)

A story about what can pass us by when we harden ourselves to the past and the people that populate it.

Alfrida, for so long an admired, urbane exponent of big-city living to her young rurally isolated niece, has lost some of her gloss by the time she accepts a university place in the same city as her aunt. 
 
Part of the Storycuts series, this short story was originally published in the collection Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage.

What Is Remembered (Storycuts)

A story about the caprices of the mind: when conscious efforts to preserve memories are shown to be unreliable.

A fleeting affair lingers in the memory of a woman. Thirty years after the event, when both husband and lover have died, she remembers one further detail. 
 
Part of the Storycuts series, this short story was previously published in the collection Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage.

The Bear Came Over The Mountain (Storycuts)

A woman experiences the changing obligations of married life and discovers it's not hard to justify a desired trespass.

A reluctant decision is made to put Fiona in a home catering for those suffering from Alzheimer's. When her husband, Grant, comes to see her, he is confused and dismayed to learn that she has struck up a close relationship with a fellow patient. 
 
Part of the Storycuts series, this short story was previously published in the collection Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage.

Queenie (Storycuts)

An elopement provides a younger step-sister with an eye-opening insight into relationships.

When Queenie elopes with a recently widowed neighbour her family are uniformly shocked, and a window on adult life and relationships is opened for her step-sister. A summertime stay with the newlyweds in Toronto yields further insight into the lives of couples, but also causes confusion. 
 
Part of the Storycuts series, this short story was previously published in the collection Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage.

Post and Beam (Storycuts)

An acute portrait of a married couple's life and the pressure of external forces on it.

Lorna finds herself strangely attracted to Lionel, a former maths prodigy and student of her husband's. When family affairs call him away and his absence coincides with the unwelcome visit of her cousin, she grows ill at ease. 
 
Part of the Storycuts series, this short story was previously published in the collection Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage.

Alice Munro

Munro is at the height of her powers...a testimony to a great talent

That Munro is a great writer of short stories should, by now, go without saying. She is also one of the two or three best writers of fiction (of any length) now alive. The title story of this collection is one of her masterpieces...a brilliant piece of story-telling, tautly-structured and exquisitely balanced

A new collection of Alice Munro stories is a literary event that more and more of us look forward to, we are very unlikely to find a richer or rarer treat all year...the eight new stories in The Love of a Good Woman show this miraculous and truly great writer at the height of her powers...a perfect story collection

Alice Munro's stories...reward each pleasurable effort, as the best fiction always does...a Munro story has the depth and intricacy of a long novel, more than any other living writer in English...she can account for 20 years of a person's life in a single, telling paragraph, or even in a subtly placed phrase...The Love of a Good Woman is a superb, but unsettling, collection

One of the finest short-story writers of our time...absorbing and brilliant

Superb...Long ago, Virginia Woolf described George Eliot as one of the few writers 'for grown-up people.' The same might today, and with equal justice, be said of Alice Munro

Alice Munro is indisputably a master. Like all great writers, she helps sharpen perception...Her imagination is fearless...A better book of stories can scarcely be imagined

A riveting collection...a lovely book. Munro's stories move through the years with a sneaky grace

A triumph...certain to seal her reputation as our contemporary Chekhov

Superlative...She distills a novel's worth of dramatic events into a story of 20 pages

These astonishing stories remind us, yet again, of the literary miracles Alice Munro continues to perform

In this collection, Alice Munro captures the lives of ordinary women; their passions and contradictions that lie just below the surface. 
 
&lsquo;One of the finest short-story writers of our time...absorbing and brilliant&rsquo; Observer 
 
Munro explores women who are unruly, ungovernable, unpredictable, unexpected, funny, sexy, and completely recognisable - and brings their hidden desires bubbling to the surface. The love of a good woman is not as pure and virtuous as it seems: as in her title story it can be needy and murderous. 
Here are women behaving badly, leaving husbands and children, running off with unsuitable lovers, pushing everyday life to the limits, and if they don't behave badly, they think surprising and disturbing thoughts. 
 
Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature 
 
Winner of the Man Booker International Prize 2009

Alice Munro

Praise for The Love of a Good Woman

Munro is at the height of her powers...a testimony to a great talent

That Munro is a great writer of short stories should, by now, go without saying. She is also one of the two or three best writers of fiction (of any length) now alive. The title story of this collection is one of he ...

A new collection of Alice Munro stories is a literary event that more and more of us look forward to, we are very unlikely to find a richer or rarer treat all year...the eight new stories in The Love of a Good Wo ...

Munro is at the height of her powers...a testimony to a great talent

That Munro is a great writer of short stories should, by now, go without saying. She is also one of the two or three best writers of fiction (of any length) now alive. The title story of this collection is one of he ...

A new collection of Alice Munro stories is a literary event that more and more of us look forward to, we are very unlikely to find a richer or rarer treat all year...the eight new stories in The Love of a Good Wo ...

Munro is at the height of her powers...a testimony to a great talent

That Munro is a great writer of short stories should, by now, go without saying. She is also one of the two or three best writers of fiction (of any length) now alive. The title story of this collection is one of he ...

A new collection of Alice Munro stories is a literary event that more and more of us look forward to, we are very unlikely to find a richer or rarer treat all year...the eight new stories in The Love of a Good Wo ...

Books by Alice Munro

Articles featuring Alice Munro

Where to start reading Alice Munro’s books

20 books everyone should read in their forties

Follow penguin

Follow ladybird

Follow puffin

Sign up to the Penguin newsletter