Open Secrets

by Alice Munro

Published 6 September 1994

Open Secrets consists of eight luminous and poetic stories, each one as rich as a novel.

'A superb collection... Marriage, gambles, disappearances, motiveless vandalism - it is the stuff of unremarkable lives, conveyed in a remarkable fashion' Independent

Ranging from the 1850s through two world wars to the present, and from Canada to Brisbane, the Balkans and the Somme, these dazzling stories reveal the secrets of unconventional women who refuse to be contained.

Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature

Winner of the Man Booker International Prize 2009


The Progress of Love

by Alice Munro

Published 12 August 1986
Eleven stunning stories that explore the most intimate and transforming moments of existence, from Nobel Prize–winning author Alice Munro, “one of the foremost practitioners of the short story” (Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times).

“Throughout this remarkable collection moments of insight flash from the pages like lightning, not necessarily providing answers—more like showing the way to new questions.”—The Philadelphia Inquirer

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 to the shaken mother the fragility between children and parents. A young man, remembering a terrifying childhood incident, wrestles with the responsibility he has always felt for his hapless younger brother. A man brings his lover on a visit to his ex-wife, only to feel unexpectedly closer to his estranged partner.
 
In these and other stories, Alice Munro proves once again a sensitive and compassionate chronicler of our times. Drawing us into the most intimate corners of ordinary lives, she reveals much about ourselves, our choices, and our experiences of love.

Too Much Happiness

by Alice Munro

Published 1 January 2009
Brilliantly paced, lit with sparks of danger and underlying menace, these are dazzling, provocative stories about Svengali men, and radical women who outmanoeuvre them, about destructive marriages and curdled friendships, about mothers and sons, and about moments which change or haunt a life. Alice Munro takes on complex, even harrowing emotions and events, and renders them into stories that surprise, amaze and shed light on the unpredictable ways we accommodate to what happens in our lives. A wife and mother, whose spirit has been crushed, finds release from her extraordinary pain in the most unlikely place. The young victim of a humiliating seduction (which involves reading Housman in the nude) finds an unusual way to get her own back and move on. An older woman, dying of cancer, weaves a poisonous story to save her life. Other stories uncover the 'deep holes' in marriage and their consequences, the dangerous intimacy of girls and the cruelty of children.
The long title story follows Sophia Kovalevsky, a late nineteenth-century Russian emigree and mathematical genius, as she takes a fateful winter journey that begins with a visit to her lover on the Riviera, and ends in Sweden, where she is a professor at the only university willing to hire a woman to teach her subject. Munro's unsettling stories turn lives into art, expand our world and our understanding of the strange workings of the human heart.

Friend of My Youth

by Alice Munro

Published 1 March 1990
WINNER OF THE NOBEL PRIZE® IN LITERATURE 2013

The ten miraculously accomplished stories in Alice Munro's Friend of My Youth not only astonish and delight but also convey the unspoken mysteries at the heart of all human experience.

"[Friend of My Youth is] a wonderful collection of stories, beautifully written and deeply felt."--Michiko Kakutani, New York Times

The Beggar Maid

by Alice Munro

Published 1 September 1979

WINNER OF THE NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE

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.

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.


The Moons of Jupiter

by Alice Munro

Published 7 May 1991
Eleven “witty, subtle, [and] passionate” (The New York Times Book Review) stories from Nobel Prize–winning author Alice Munro, “a true master of the form” (Salman Rushdie)

“Alice Munro’s fine and intelligent stories are like Edward Hopper paintings, lit with a relentless clarity, and richly illuminating the perplexities of human connection, their possibilities and pain.”—Washington Post Book World
 
In these piercingly lovely and endlessly surprising stories by one of the most acclaimed practitioners of the art of fiction, many things happen; there are betrayals and reconciliations, love affairs consummated and mourned. But the true events in The Moons of Jupiter are the ways in which the characters are transformed over time, coming to view their past selves with anger, regret, and infinite compassion that communicate themselves to us with electrifying force.

Lives of Girls & Women

by Alice Munro

Published 1 January 1972
WINNER OF THE NOBEL PRIZE® IN LITERATURE 2013

The only novel from Alice Munro-award-winning author of The Love of a Good Woman--is an insightful, honest book, "autobiographical in form but not in fact," that chronicles a young girl's growing up in rural Ontario in the 1940's.

Del Jordan lives out at the end of the Flats Road on her father's fox farm, where her most frequent companions are an eccentric bachelor family friend and her rough younger brother. When she begins spending more time in town, she is surrounded by women-her mother, an agnostic, opinionted woman who sells encyclopedias to local farmers; her mother's boarder, the lusty Fern Dogherty; and her best friend, Naomi, with whom she shares the frustrations and unbridled glee of adolescence.

Through these unwitting mentors and in her own encounters with sex, birth, and death, Del explores the dark and bright sides of womanhood. All along she remains a wise, witty observer and recorder of truths in small-town life. The result is a powerful, moving, and humorous demonstration of Alice Munro's unparalleled awareness of the lives of girls and women.

Dear Life

by Alice Munro

Published 1 January 2012

**Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature**

Alice Munro captures the essence of life in her brilliant new collection of stories. Moments of change, chance encounters, the twist of fate that leads a person to a new way of thinking or being: the stories in Dear Life build to form a radiant, indelible portrait of just how dangerous and strange ordinary life can be.


Runaway

by Alice Munro

Published 1 November 2004
In Alice Munro’s superb new collection, we find stories about women of all ages and circumstances, their lives made palpable by the subtlety and empathy of this incomparable writer.

The runaway of the title story is a young woman who, though she thinks she wants to, is incapable of leaving her husband. In "Passion," a country girl emerging into the larger world via a job in a resort hotel discovers in a single moment of stunning insight the limits and lies of that mysterious emotion. Three stories are about a woman named Juliet–in the first, she escapes from teaching at a girls’ school into a wild and irresistible love match; in the second she returns with her child to the home of her parents, whose life and marriage she finally begins to examine; and in the last, her child, caught, she mistakenly thinks, in the grip of a religious cult, vanishes into an unexplained and profound silence. In the final story, "Powers," a young woman with the ability to read the future sets off a chain of events that involves her husband-to-be and a friend in a lifelong pursuit of what such a gift really means, and who really has it.

Throughout this compelling collection, Alice Munro’s understanding of the people about whom she writes makes them as vivid as our own neighbors. Here are the infinite betrayals and surprises of love–between men and women, between friends, between parents and children–that are the stuff of all our lives. It is Alice Munro’s special gift to make these stories as vivid and real as our own.
(front flap)

WINNER OF THE NOBEL PRIZE® IN LITERATURE 2013

In the thirteen stories in her remarkable second collection, Alice Munro demonstrates the precise observation, straightforward prose style, and masterful technique that led no less a critic than John Updike to compare her to Chekhov. The sisters, mothers and daughters, aunts, grandmothers, and friends in these stories shimmer with hope and love, anger and reconciliation, as they contend with their histories and their present, and what they can see of the future.

Family Furnishings

by Alice Munro

Published 1 January 2014
From Canada's most beloved author, and winner of the 2013 Nobel Prize in Literature--perhaps our most beloved author--a new selection of her peerless short fiction, gathered from the collections of the last two decades, a companion volume to Selected Stories (1968-1994)
     No Nobel Prize in recent years has garnered the enthusiastic reception that Alice Munro's has, and in its wake, her reputation and readership have skyrocketed worldwide. Now, Family Furnishings gives us twenty-five of her most accomplished, most powerfully affecting stories, most of them set in the territory she has so brilliantly made her own: the small towns and flatlands of southwestern Ontario. Subtly honed with the author's hallmark precision, grace, and compassion, these stories illuminate the ordinary but quite extraordinary particularity in the lives of men, women, and children as they discover sex, fall in love, part, quarrel, head out into the unknown, suffer defeat, and find a way to be in the world.

The View from Castle Rock

by Alice Munro

Published 1 January 2006
'Alice Munro has a strong claim to being the best fiction writer now working in North America...She is speaking to you and to me right here, right now.' - Jonathan Franzen. On a clear day, you could see 'America' from Edinburgh's Castle Rock - or so said Alice Munro's great-great-great-grandfather, James Laidlaw, when he had drink taken. Then, in 1818, Laidlaw left the parish of 'no advantages', of banked Presbyterian emotions and uncanny tales - where, like his more famous cousin James Hogg, he was born and bred - and sailed to the new world with his family. This is the story of those shepherds from the Ettrick Valley and their descendants, among them the author herself. They were a Spartan lot, who kept to themselves; showing off was frowned on, and fear was commonplace, at least for females...But opportunities present themselves for two strong-minded women in a ship's close quarters; a father dies, and a baby vanishes en route from Illinois to Canada; another story hints at incest; childhood is short and hazardous. This is family history where imperfect recollections blur into fiction, where the past shows through the present like the tracks of a glacier on a geological map.
And woven into it are first-person stories that draw on material from Munro's own life...First love flowers under an apple tree while lust rears its head in a barn; a restless mother with ideas beyond her station declines painfully; a father farms fox fur and turkeys; a clever girl escapes to college and then into a hasty marriage. Beneath the ordinary landscape there's a different story - evocative, frightening, sexy, unexpected, gripping. Alice Munro tells it like no other.

Selected Stories

by Alice Munro

Published 15 September 2015

Covering the first half of Nobel Prize winner Alice Munro's career, these are some of the best, most touching and powerful short stories ever written.

‘Munro can pack more into one of her stories - more subtlety, more grace, more tender twists of the human heart - than many novelists do’ Independent

This first-ever selection of Alice Munro's stories sums up her genius. Her territory is the secrets that cackle beneath the façade of everyday lives, the pain and promises, loves and fears of apparently ordinary men and women whom she renders extraordinary and unforgettable.

This volume brings together the best of Munro's stories, from 1968 through to 1994. The second selected volume of her stories, 1995-2009 is also published by Vintage Classics.

‘Few writers capture the moral ambiguities, murkiness, messiness - and joy - of relationships with as much empathy and grace as Munro’ Guardian

Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature

Winner of the Man Booker International Prize 2009


In these stories whole lives come into focus through single events or sudden memories which bring the past bubbling to the surface. The past, as her characters discover, is made up not only of what is remembered, but also what isn't. The past is there, just out of the picture, but if memories haven't been savoured, recalled in the mind and boxed away, it's as if they have never been - until a moment when the pieces of the jigsaw re-form suddenly, sometimes pleasurably but more often painfully. Women look back at their young selves, at first marriages made when they were naïve and trusting, at husbands and their difficult, demanding little ways. There is in this new collection an underlying heartbreak, a sense of regret in her characters for what might have been, for a fork in the road not taken, a memory suppressed in an act of prudent emotional housekeeping. But at the same time there is hope, there are second chances - here are people who reinvent themselves, seize life by the throat, who have moved on and can dare to conjure up the hidden memories, daring to go beyond what is remembered.

WINNER OF THE NOBEL PRIZE® IN LITERATURE 2013

In eight new stories, a master of the form extends and magnifies her great themes--the vagaries of love, the passion that leads down unexpected paths, the chaos hovering just under the surface of things, and the strange, often comical desires of the human heart.

Time stretches out in some of the stories: a man and a woman look back forty years to the summer they met--the summer, as it turns out, that the true nature of their lives was revealed. In others time is telescoped: a young girl finds in the course of an evening that the mother she adores, and whose fluttery sexuality she hopes to emulate, will not sustain her--she must count on herself.

Some choices are made--in a will, in a decision to leave home--with irrevocable and surprising consequences. At other times disaster is courted or barely skirted: when a mother has a startling dream about her baby; when a woman, driving her grandchildren to visit the lakeside haunts of her youth, starts a game that could have dangerous consequences. The rich layering that gives Alice Munro's work so strong a sense of life is particularly apparent in the title story, in which the death of a local optometrist brings an entire town into focus--from the preadolescent boys who find his body, to the man who probably killed him, to the woman who must decide what to do about what she might know. Large, moving, profound--these are stories that extend the limits of fiction.

Vintage Munro

by Alice Munro

Published 6 January 2004
This classic collection—now revised and expanded—is the perfect introduction to Nobel Laureate Alice Munro's brilliant, revelatory short stories, in which she unfolds the wordless secrets that lie at the center of human experience. 

The stories in this volume span Munro's career: The title stories from her collections The Moons of Jupiter; The Progress of Love; and Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage; “Differently,” from Friend of My Youth; “Carried Away,” from Open Secrets; and (new to this edition) "In Sight of the Lake," from Dear Life. Vintage Munro also includes the text of the Nobel Prize Presentation Speech, given by Peter Englund, Permanent Secretary of the Swedish Academy.

Dance of the Happy Shades

by Alice Munro

Published 11 August 1998
Fifteen stunning short stories from Nobel Prize–winning author Alice Munro, “a true master of the form” (Salman Rushdie).

“How does one know when one is in the grip of art—of a major talent? . . . It is art that speaks from the pages of Alice Munro’s stories.”—The Wall Street Journal
 
A young girl gets an unexpected glimpse into her father’s past when she realizes the sales call they’ve made one summer afternoon during the Great Depression is to his old sweetheart. A married woman, returning home after the death of her invalid mother, tries to release the sister who’d stayed behind as their mother’s caretaker. The audience at a children’s piano recital receives a surprising lesson in the power of art to transform when a not-quite-right student performs with unexpected musicality and a spirit of joy.
 
In Dance of the Happy Shades, Alice Munro conjures ordinary lives with an extraordinary vision, displaying the remarkable talent for which she is now widely celebrated. Set on farms, by river marshes, in the lonely towns and new suburbs of western Ontario, these tales are luminous acts of attention to those vivid moments when revelation emerges from the layers of experience that lie behind even the most everyday events and lives.

Away from Her

by Alice Munro

Published 17 April 2007

WINNER OF THE NOBEL PRIZE® IN LITERATURE 2013

Alice Munro has long been heralded for her penetrating, lyrical prose, and in “The Bear Came Over the Mountain” – the basis for Sarah Polley’s film Away From Her — her prodigious talents are once again on display. As she follows Grant, a retired professor whose wife Fiona begins gradually to lose her memory and drift away from him, we slowly see how a lifetime of intimate details can create a marriage, and how mysterious the bonds of love really are.


Julieta (Movie Tie-in Edition)

by Alice Munro

Published 13 December 2016
The Three Stories that Inspired the Movie
With a foreword by Pedro Almodóvar


Alice Munro is cherished for her exquisite, affecting meditations on the human heart. In these three linked stories, “Chance,” “Soon,” and “Silence”—which, together, inspired Pedro Almodóvar’s film Julieta—her virtuosic talents are once again on display. The stories follow a schoolteacher named Juliet as she is swept up by fate: meeting an older man on a train and starting an affair; later, visiting her parents as a young mother; and later still, searching for contact with her estranged daughter. As with all of Munro’s characters, Juliet radiates warmth, dignity, and hope, even as she is unflinching in the face of betrayal and loss. In Munro’s hands, her journey is as surprising, extraordinary, and precious as life itself.