Alice Munro

Dance of the Happy Shades

227 pages

Fifteen stories about life in rural Ontario deal with adolescence, loneliness, broken hearts, an abandoned wife, family relations, blind dates, and an aspiring writer.

Friend of My Youth

Published 1990

A collection of ten short stories deals with such subjects as a woman haunted by dreams of her dead mother; an adulterous couple; and a widow discovering unpleasant truths about her husband's past.

Open Secrets

304 pages

In these eight tales, Munro evokes the devastating power of old love suddenly recollected. She tells of vanished schoolgirls and indentured frontier brides and an eccentric recluse who, in the course of one surpassingly odd dinner party, inadvertently lands herself a wealthy suitor from exotic Australia. And Munro shows us how one woman's romantic tale of capture and escape in the high Balkans may end up inspiring another woman who is fleeing a husband and lover in present-day Canada.

Runaway

Published 2004 · 344 pages

Runaway is a book of short stories by Alice Munro. First published in 2004 by McClelland and Stewart, it was awarded that year's Giller Prize and Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize.

The Beggar Maid

The Moons of Jupiter

Published 1982

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 twleve unforgettable stories, laying bare the unexpected and yet inescapable pain of human contact.

The Progress of Love

Published 1986

A divorced woman returns to her childhood home where she confronts the memory of her parents' confounding yet deep bond. The accidental near-drowning of a child exposes the fragility of the trust between children and parents. A young man, remembering a terrifying childhood incident, wrestles with the responsibility he has always felt for his younger brother. In these and other stories Alice Munro proves once again a sensitive and compassionate chronicler of our times.

Too Much Happiness

Published 2009

Ten superb new stories by one of our most beloved and admired writers--the winner of the 2009 Man Booker International Prize. In the first story a young wife and mother receives release from the unbearable pain of losing her three children from a most surprising source. In another, a young woman, in the aftermath of an unusual and humiliating seduction, reacts in a clever if less-than-admirable fashion. Other stories uncover the "deep-holes" in a marriage, the unsuspected cruelty of children, and how a boy's disfigured face provides both the good things in his life and the bad.

Who Do You Think You Are?

Published 1978 · 224 pages

Interweaving stories tell of the evolving bond between practical, narrow-minded Flo and her stepdaughter Rose, who manages to escape her small town life to achieve an equivocal success in the larger world.