The Penguin Podcast is back! Listen Now
Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage

Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage

Summary

In these stories lives come into focus through single events or sudden memories which bring the past bubbling to the surface.

No one could possibly dispute Munro's greatness’ 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

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