Who Do You Think You Are?

Who Do You Think You Are?

A BBC Between the Covers Big Jubilee Read Pick

Summary

WINNER OF THE NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE

**A BBC BETWEEN THE COVERS BIG JUBILEE READ 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

Reviews

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

About the author

Alice Munro

**Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature**

Alice Munro was born in 1931 and is the author of thirteen collections of stories, most recently Dear Life, 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, 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.

She lives in Port Hope, Ontario, near lake Ontario in Canada.
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