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Friend of My Youth

Friend of My Youth

Summary

Read Alice Munro’s dark and powerful exploration of the human heart in this ten-story collection.

‘Brilliant at evoking life's diversity and unpredictability...an unrivalled chronicler of human nature under a vast span of aspects, moods, and pressures’ Sunday Times

A woman haunted by dreams of her dead mother. An adulterous couple stepping over the line where the initial excitement ends, and the pain begins. A widow visiting a Scottish village in search of her husband's past - and instead, discovering unsettling truths about a total stranger. The ten stories in this collection not only astonish and delight but also convey the unspoken mysteries at the heart of all human experience.

Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature

Winner of the Man Booker International Prize 2009

Reviews

  • Read not more than one of her stories a day, and allow them to work their spell: they are made last
    Observer

About the author

Alice Munro

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.
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