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Dance of the Happy Shades

Dance of the Happy Shades

Summary

Discover Alice Munro’s first mesmerising and atmospheric short story collection.

‘A remarkable writer whose major characters emerge in shining clarity... A major talent is at work here’ 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

Reviews

  • The finest writer of short stories working in the English language today
    The Times

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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