In Home Truths, Mavis Gallant draws us into the tricky labyrinth of human behaviour, while offering readers her unique, clear-eyed vision of Canadians both at home and abroad. Ranging in time and place from small-town Quebec during the Depression, to Geneva and Paris in the 1950s, to contemporary Vancouver Island, these stories explore the remorseless cruelty of children, the tensions that affect all families, the dangerous but endearing naïveté of young girls in love with Europe, and the terrible distances that divide people who love each other. And in the celebrated “Linnet Muir” stories, Gallant draws on her own experiences to portray a sensitive and alarmingly perceptive young girl growing up in Montreal in the 1930s and 1940s. Incisive, darkly humorous, and compassionate, Home Truths is a vibrant collection of stories from one of our finest writers.

 Mavis Gallant (1922–2014) once told an interviewer that she could no more stop being Canadian than she could change the colour of her eyes. Born in Montreal, she left a career as a leading journalist in that city to move to Paris in 1950 to write.

She published stories on a regular basis in The New Yorker, many of which were anthologized. Her worldwide reputation was established by books such as From The Fifteenth District and Home Truths, which won the Governor General’s Award in 1982. In that same year she was made an Officer of the Order of Canada, becoming a Companion of the Order in 1993, the year she published Across the Bridge and was the recipient of a special tribute at the Harbourfront International Festival of Authors in Toronto. She received several honorary degrees from Canadian universities and remained a much sought-after public speaker.

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“One of the great short story writers of our time.”
–Michael Ondaatje

“The irrefutable master of the short story in English, Mavis Gallant has, among her colleagues, many admirers but no peer. She is the standout. She is the standard-bearer.
She is the standard.”
–Fran Lebowitz

“The worlds that Gallant creates are so complete that, as readers, we can live inside them.”
–Financial Post
“One of the best writers of our language, an artist who is above fad and fashion.”
–Saturday Night
“We carry these stories around with us for days after we finish reading them because of their profound human ambiguities.…These stories lodge in our minds and become part of our happiness, the happiness of knowing that perfection, wrought from an imperfect world, is possible.”
–Financial Post
“One begins comparing her best moments to those of major figures in literary history. Names like Henry James, Checkhov and George Eliot dance across the mind. Gallant’s accomplishment is on an extraordinarily high level.”
–Canadian Reader
“Terrifyingly good.”
–Margaret Atwood

“She has written many short stories. My calculation suggests that she has written in this form at least the equivalent of twenty novels.”
–Robertson Davies