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In Home Truths, Mavis Gallant draws us into the tricky labyrinth of human behaviour, while offering readers her unique, clear-eyed vision of Canadians both at home and abroad. Ranging in time and place from small-town Quebec during the Depression, to Geneva and Paris in the 1950s, to contemporary Vancouver Island, these stories explore the remorseless cruelty of children, the tensions that affect all families, the dangerous but endearing naïveté of young girls in love with Europe, and the terrible distances that divide people who love each other. And in the celebrated “Linnet Muir” stories, Gallant draws on her own experiences to portray a sensitive and alarmingly perceptive young girl growing up in Montreal in the 1930s and 1940s. Incisive, darkly humorous, and compassionate, Home Truths is a vibrant collection of stories from one of our finest writers.
About this Author
MAVIS GALLANT was born in Quebec, Canada, in 1922. She began her career as a journalist, before switching to fiction in 1950. She moved to Paris a decade later, and spent the rest of her life there. She published 116 stories in The New Yorker over the course of her career; additionally, she wrote two novels, a play, and a collection of essays. A recipient of the 2002 Rea Award for the Short Story, Gallant was also awarded the 2004 PEN/Nabokov Award for lifetime achievement and the Governor General's Literary Award for English-language fiction. She was named Officer of the Order of Canada in 1981, and in 1993 she was promoted to Companion of the Order. She died in 2014.
Reviews
“One of the great short story writers of our time.”
–Michael Ondaatje
“The irrefutable master of the short story in English, Mavis Gallant has, among her colleagues, many admirers but no peer. She is the standout. She is the standard-bearer.
She is the standard.”
–Fran Lebowitz
“The worlds that Gallant creates are so complete that, as readers, we can live inside them.”
–Financial Post
“One of the best writers of our language, an artist who is above fad and fashion.”
–Saturday Night
“We carry these stories around with us for days after we finish reading them because of their profound human ambiguities.…These stories lodge in our minds and become part of our happiness, the happiness of knowing that perfection, wrought from an imperfect world, is possible.”
–Financial Post
“One begins comparing her best moments to those of major figures in literary history. Names like Henry James, Checkhov and George Eliot dance across the mind. Gallant’s accomplishment is on an extraordinarily high level.”
–Canadian Reader
“Terrifyingly good.”
–Margaret Atwood
“She has written many short stories. My calculation suggests that she has written in this form at least the equivalent of twenty novels.”
–Robertson Davies
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