The Penguin Podcast is back! Listen Now
Open Secrets

Open Secrets

Summary

Open Secrets consists of eight luminous and poetic stories, each one as rich as a novel.

'A superb collection... Marriage, gambles, disappearances, motiveless vandalism - it is the stuff of unremarkable lives, conveyed in a remarkable fashion' Independent

Ranging from the 1850s through two world wars to the present, and from Canada to Brisbane, the Balkans and the Somme, these dazzling stories reveal the secrets of unconventional women who refuse to be contained.

Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature

Winner of the Man Booker International Prize 2009

Reviews

  • Brilliant at evoking life's diversity and unpredictability, [Alice Munro is] an unrivalled chronicler of human nature
    Sunday 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.
Learn More

Sign up to the Penguin Newsletter

For the latest books, recommendations, author interviews and more