The Penguin Podcast is back! Listen Now
The Progress of Love

The Progress of Love

Summary

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.

Complete, complex, and brilliantly structured’ 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

Reviews

  • She has a touch of genius
    Mail on Sunday

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.
Learn More

Sign up to the Penguin Newsletter

For the latest books, recommendations, author interviews and more