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The fourteen stories in this brilliant collection show Alice Munro coming home to southwestern Ontario, with Toronto looming on the horizon. Even "To Reach Japan," where a Vancouver mother takes her young daughter across the country by train, ends in Toronto. On that journey, different kinds of passion produce surprises, both on the journey and at its end.
The range of storytellers is astonishing, as we hear the young voices of women recalling their teenage years and the equally convincing voice of an old woman fighting Alzheimer's. Margaret Atwood once shrewdly noted that "pushing the sexual boundaries is distinctly thrilling for many a Munro woman," and very few of these stories deal with men and women in sedate, conventional domestic settings.
Munro admirers will see that these stories are shorter than many in her recent collections, but they have all the sharpness, accessibility, and power of her earlier work, and they are--as always--full of "real" people. The final four works ("not quite stories") bring the author home, literally. She writes: "I believe they are the first and last--and the closest--things I have to say about my own life."
About this Author
ALICE MUNRO grew up in Wingham, Ontario and attended the University of Western Ontario (now Western University), studying journalism and English. Her first collection of stories was published in 1968 as Dance of the Happy Shades, which garnered much acclaim and won the Governor General's Literary Award for English fiction that year. Three years later, she published her only novel, Lives of Girls and Women. Over the next few decades, she published many more short story collections, including Who Do You Think You Are?; The Moons of Jupiter; Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage, from which a story was later adapted into the two-time Academy Award-winning movie, Away from Her; Runaway; and The View from Castle Rock. Her stories appeared regularly in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and The Paris Review.
In 1978 Munro received her second Governor General's Literary Award for Who Do You Think You Are? and her third in 1986 with The Progress of Love. In 2009 she won the Man Booker International Prize for her lifetime body of work. Her final story collection, Dear Life, came in 2012, and the next year, the same year she retired from writing, she won the Nobel Prize in Literature, hailed as the "master of the contemporary short story." Munro has also been the recipient of the National Book Critics Circle Award, the W.H. Smith Award, two Giller Prizes, several Trillium Prizes, the Jubilee Prize, and the Commonwealth Writers' Prize Best Book Award, among many others.
Munro died in Millbrook, Ontario, in 2024.
Reviews
Winner of the 2013 Trillium Book Award
National Bestseller
"In her brilliant new collection, Dear Life, Alice Munro's insights are beyond rare. With a few short phrases, she digs down to the very core of an individual life, then rockets back up to the social surface, seamlessly revealing what makes all of our lives both wondrous and wicked."
--The 2013 Trillium Book Prize Jury Comment
"It has become practically de rigeur to refer to Munro as 'our Chekhov.'. . . But at this point in Munro's career, how much can it add? What is certain is this: She is our Munro. And how fortunate we are to call her that."
--New York Times Book Review
"These stories are perfect. . . . A collection as rich and surprising as any in Alice Munro's deep career."
--National Post
"She is, and has been for decades, one of our most important writers, one whose work represents all the most essential and pleasurable aspects of literature, and which reminds us of what great literature is."
--The Globe and Mail
"As always, Munro writes with piercing insight about childhood, relationships, and Canadian small-town life."
--The New Yorker
"A new collection by Alice Munro is cause for celebration. . . . Intensely pleasurable."
--Vancouver Sun
"[A] startling account of character types familiar to Munro's readers. We've encountered these people before, the reader thinks, but not with such stark, almost surreal insight."
--Quill & Quire
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