Penguin_Where-to-Start-With-Alice-Munro-1800×1200-1

Where to start with...

Where to start reading Alice Munro’s books

A gif of a birthday cake with '40' candles atop, with flickering flames.

Classics-to-read-by-Age_40s_Desktop_Hero_Penguin.gif

Reading lists

20 books everyone should read in their forties

The Progress of Love

2021 sees all of Alice Munro's backlist reissued in a new, modern look. These editions will appeal to a broad range of literary readers

Whatever it is that makes some writing come alive in every phrase and sentence, Alice Munro has it... I wouldn't willingly miss one of her stories

Munro has been compared with Proust, shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and remains - though dazzling - quite unperturbed and unaffected, her writing smooth and supple

A work of great brilliance and depth... Munro's power of analysis, of sensation, and thoughts, is almost Proustian in its sureness

Only a few writers continue to create those full-bodied miniature universes of the old school. Some of her short stories are so ample and fulfilling that they feel like novels. They present whole landscapes and cultures, whole families of characters

In range and depth her short stories are almost novels...complete, complex, and brilliantly structured... One of the finest living short-story writers

One of the foremost contemporary practitioners of the short story

Like her similarly gifted contemporaries Peter Taylor, William Trevor, Edna O'Brien...Alice Munro writes stories that have the density - moral, emotional, sometimes historical - of other writers' novels

A...writer of great sensitivity and delicacy. Her new collection of stories show no falling off in her gift for putting the ordinary into a sharp, clear persepective, seem very near and also very far away

She draws her readers irresistably into the undergrowth of other people's private lives

Alice Munro was born in 1931 and was the author of thirteen collections of stories and the novel, Lives of Girls and Women. She received many awards and prizes, including three of Canada’s Governor General’s Literary Awards and two Giller Prizes, the Rea Award for the Short Story, the Lannan Literary Award, the WHSmith Book Award in the UK, the National Book Critics Circle Award in the US, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize for Who Do You Think You Are? (previously published as The Beggar Maid), and was awarded the Man Booker International Prize 2009 for her overall contribution to fiction on the world stage, and in 2013 she won the Nobel Prize in Literature. Her stories have appeared in the New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly, Paris Review and other publications, and her collections have been translated into thirteen languages. Alice Munro died in 2024.

These dazzling and utterly satisfying stories explore varieties and degrees of love - filial, platonic, sexual, parental, and imagined - in the lives of apparently ordinary folk. 
 
&lsquo;Complete, complex, and brilliantly structured&rsquo; Daily Telegraph 
 
In fact, Munro's characters pulse with idiosyncratic life. Under the polished surface of these unsentimental dispatches from the small-town and rural front lies a strong undertow of violence and sexuality, repressed until something snaps, with extraordinary force in some of the stories, sadly and strangely in others. 
 
Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature 
 
Winner of the Man Booker International Prize 2009

The Moons of Jupiter

Only a few writers continue to create those full-bodied miniature universes of the old school.  Some of her short stories are so ample and fulfilling that they feel like novels.  They present whole landscapes and cultures, who families of characters

The writer's questioning memory gives us sharp flashes of reality that are so vividly recalled they permit us to live another life for a moment.

Witty, subtle, passionate, The Moons of Jupiter is exceptionally knowledgeable about the content and movement - the entanglements and entailments - of individual human feeling. And the knowledge it offers can't be looked up elsewhere

Munro is in a class of her own.... No other writer working today is able to invest the humble story with more power, grace or breadth.... Munro has been compared to Chekhov... She has the haunting lyricism and the indulgent wisdom to qualify.

How does one know when one is in the grip of art, a major talent? One feels it in the assurance, the sensibility behind every line of a work; one knows its presence as much from what is withheld as from what is given or explained. It is art that speaks from the pages of Alice Munro's stories.

THE WINNER OF THE NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE 
 
The characters who populate an Alice Munro story live and breathe. Passions hopelessly conceived, affections betrayed, marriages made and broken: the joys, fears, loves and awakenings of women echo throughout these twelve unforgettable stories, laying bare the unexceptional and yet inescapable pain of human contact.

The Love of a Good Woman

Munro is at the height of her powers...a testimony to a great talent

That Munro is a great writer of short stories should, by now, go without saying. She is also one of the two or three best writers of fiction (of any length) now alive. The title story of this collection is one of her masterpieces...a brilliant piece of story-telling, tautly-structured and exquisitely balanced

A new collection of Alice Munro stories is a literary event that more and more of us look forward to, we are very unlikely to find a richer or rarer treat all year...the eight new stories in The Love of a Good Woman show this miraculous and truly great writer at the height of her powers...a perfect story collection

Alice Munro's stories...reward each pleasurable effort, as the best fiction always does...a Munro story has the depth and intricacy of a long novel, more than any other living writer in English...she can account for 20 years of a person's life in a single, telling paragraph, or even in a subtly placed phrase...The Love of a Good Woman is a superb, but unsettling, collection

One of the finest short-story writers of our time...absorbing and brilliant

Superb...Long ago, Virginia Woolf described George Eliot as one of the few writers 'for grown-up people.' The same might today, and with equal justice, be said of Alice Munro

Alice Munro is indisputably a master. Like all great writers, she helps sharpen perception...Her imagination is fearless...A better book of stories can scarcely be imagined

A riveting collection...a lovely book. Munro's stories move through the years with a sneaky grace

A triumph...certain to seal her reputation as our contemporary Chekhov

Superlative...She distills a novel's worth of dramatic events into a story of 20 pages

These astonishing stories remind us, yet again, of the literary miracles Alice Munro continues to perform

In this collection, Alice Munro captures the lives of ordinary women; their passions and contradictions that lie just below the surface. 
 
&lsquo;One of the finest short-story writers of our time...absorbing and brilliant&rsquo; Observer 
 
Munro explores women who are unruly, ungovernable, unpredictable, unexpected, funny, sexy, and completely recognisable - and brings their hidden desires bubbling to the surface. The love of a good woman is not as pure and virtuous as it seems: as in her title story it can be needy and murderous. 
Here are women behaving badly, leaving husbands and children, running off with unsuitable lovers, pushing everyday life to the limits, and if they don't behave badly, they think surprising and disturbing thoughts. 
 
Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature 
 
Winner of the Man Booker International Prize 2009

Too Much Happiness

She writes with a beautiful clarity, an elemental humanity and a marvellous, limpid, funny, apprehension of what goes on

Some of the most honest, intuitive and exacting fiction, long or short, of our time

Munro's bold, unflinching narratives have taken the short story places many a novelist has feared to tread... That she does this in a style both calm and deliberate, fluid yet tightly controlled, stark yet compassionate, is what makes her insights into the human condition so profound

Written with veteran assurance, brimming with intensely believable characters and rich social detail, these dispatches from the most unsparing reaches of Munro's imagination confirm her acclaimed place on the highest ground of contemporary fiction

Alice Munro commands enormous respect and almost uncritical adoration from her readers

Too Much Happiness is her 11th collection, and as brilliant and surprising as any ... who could be better?

She has the lightest of touches, with every word seeming entirely necessary, but nothing set in stone....remarkable collection

Munro is famously hard to write about, in part because she's the opposite of the Borges character who joked about belonging not to art but to the history of art. Far from hanging on to the gates of literature, her stories create a powerful illusion of bringing their readers up against unmediated life; and life isn't penetrable by the normal procedures of book reviewing. Is Too Much Happiness as substantial a collection as Runaway (2004) or Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage (2001)? The only sensible answer is to recommend buying all three

As strong and vivid as ever... a gift for the humane observation and the specific, plausible detail

Assured collection from the short-story queen

These are beguiling, provocative stories about manipulative men and the women who outwit them. 
&lsquo;Brimming with intensely believable characters and rich social detail&rsquo; Sunday Times 
 
A wife and mother whose spirit has been crushed finds release from her extraordinary pain in the most unlikely of places. The young victim of a humiliating seduction 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. 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. 
 
Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature 
 
Winner of the Man Booker International Prize 2009

The View from Castle Rock

Alice Munro turns to her family for inspiration; and what follows is a fictionalised, brilliantly imagined version of the past. 
 
&lsquo;One of my very favourite writers&rsquo; Claire Tomalin 
 
From her ancestors' view from Edinburgh's Castle Rock in the eighteenth century to her parents' thwarted ambitions in Ontario, and her own awakening in 1950s Canada, Munro effortlessly weaves fact and myth to create an epic story of past and present, proving that fiction has much to tell us about life. 
 
Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature 
 
Winner of the Man Booker International Prize 2009

Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage

In these stories lives come into focus through single events or sudden memories which bring the past bubbling to the surface. 
 
&lsquo;No one could possibly dispute Munro's greatness&rsquo; Daily Mail 
 
The past, as Alice Munro's 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 naive and trusting, at husbands and their difficult, demanding little ways in a collection filled with both underlying heartbreak and hope. 
 
Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature 
 
Winner of the Man Booker International Prize 2009

Alice Munro

Discover Alice Munro&rsquo;s first mesmerising and atmospheric short story collection. 
 
&lsquo;A remarkable writer whose major characters emerge in shining clarity... A major talent is at work here&rsquo; Los Angeles Times 
 
Alice Munro's territory is the farms and semi-rural towns of south-western Ontario. 
In these dazzling stories she deals with the self-discovery of adolescence, the joys and pains of love and the despair and guilt of those caught in a narrow existence. And in sensitively exploring the lives of ordinary men and women, she makes us aware of the universal nature of their fears, sorrows, and aspirations. 
 
Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature 
 
Winner of the Man Booker International Prize 200

Alice Munro

Dance of the Happy Shades

Select a format:

Retailers:

Summary

More books from this author