Alice Munro demonstrates mastery of her craft in 15 stories culled from five recent collections
Alice Munro dissects the actions and motivations of her characters in stories set in small-town Canada. Photograph: Canadian Press/Rex Features
While occupied with the repetitious mundanity of keeping house and tending to small children, one of Alice Munro's young mothers will recall the adulterous affair she is meanwhile conducting and note how this tacit acknowledgment of her secret life "disturbed her like a radiant explosion".
Oddly, coming across those words brought to mind my reaction on first reading Munro. Having picked up a battered proof of her 2004 collection Runaway in a secondhand bookshop some years back, I found myself struck on a visceral level by the stories within. Their expansiveness and depth of character was astonishing, belied by their diminutive size, while the precision and bite of her writing stunned and left me awestruck.
Since that time, Munro has added a Nobel prize and the International Man Booker to her list of accolades. Naturally this selection, with its crop of 15 stories spanning five of her more recent collections, must be aimed primarily at the uninitiated and the curious. And oh my, what an introduction.
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Oddly, coming across those words brought to mind my reaction on first reading Munro. Having picked up a battered proof of her 2004 collection Runaway in a secondhand bookshop some years back, I found myself struck on a visceral level by the stories within. Their expansiveness and depth of character was astonishing, belied by their diminutive size, while the precision and bite of her writing stunned and left me awestruck.Since that time, Munro has added a Nobel prize and the International Man Booker to her list of accolades. Naturally this selection, with its crop of 15 stories spanning five of her more recent collections, must be aimed primarily at the uninitiated and the curious. And oh my, what an introduction.
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