The Love of a Good Woman - Alice Munro

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.