Carried Away

Description

The stories in Carried Away - hand-picked by the author herself - span a quarter of a century of the career of Alice Munro, repeatedly hailed as one of the greatest living writers of short fiction. Set in her native southwest Ontario, they include 'Royal Beatings', in which a young girl, her father and her stepmother release the tension of their circumstances in a ritual of punishment and reconciliation; 'Friend of My Youth', in which a woman comes to understand that her difficult mother is not so very different from herself; and 'The Love of a Good Woman', in which, when an old crime resurfaces, a woman has to choose whether to believe in the man she intends to marry. Like the World War I soldier of the title story, whose letters from the front to a small-town librarian he doesn't know change her life for ever, Munro's unassuming characters take permanent hold of our imaginations. Her incomparable empathy for the people she writes about, the depth of her understanding of human nature, and the grace and surprise of her narrative add up to a richly layered and capacious fiction.

**Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature** Alice Munro was born in 1931 and is the author of thirteen collections of stories, most recently Dear Life, and a novel, Lives of Girls and Women. She has 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 The Beggar Maid, and has been 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. She lives in Port Hope, Ontario, near lake Ontario in Canada.

"Munro stands as one of the living colossi of the modern short story, and her Chekhovian realism, her keen psychological insight, her instinctive feel for the emotional arithmetic of domestic life have indelibly stamped contemporary writing." --NEW YORK TIMES "In Alice Munro's hands, the smallest moments contain the central truths of a lifetime." --MACLEAN'S "Alice Munro has a strong claim to being the best fiction writer now working in North America." --NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW "Captivating . . . Munro does what most writers dream of doing and succeeds at it, page after page, story after story, collection after collection." --THE OREGONIAN "From a markedly finite number of essential components, Munro rather miraculously spins out countless permutations of desire and despair, attenuated hopes and cloudbursts of epiphany . . . Every one of these women is different, and that is the wonder of Alice Munro." --THE VILLAGE VOICE "Alic