A mother and daughter, caged with the internal strife of stifled desires, trapped ambition, and silenced dreams, seeking more in the world beyond home.

"There is a change coming in the lives of girls and women." Del Jordan and her mother long for more outside of their small home town of Jubilee, though they cannot say so, at the risk of inviting the ire of the town. In her distinctive literary style, Munro presents a thought-provoking cycle on two women coping with the claustrophobic habits and norms of small town life competing with their greater ambitions and desires to leave. But do all roads ultimately lead back home?

Alice Munro grew up in Wingham, Ontario, and attended the University of Western Ontario. She has published ten previous books-Dance of the Happy Shades; Lives Of Girls And Women; Something I've Been Meaning To Tell You; Who Do You Think You Are?; The Moons Of Jupiter; The Progress Of Love; Friend of My Youth; Open Secrets; The Love of a Good Woman; and Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage-as well as Selected Stories, an anthology of stories culled from her dazzling body of work.

During her distinguished career, Munro has been the recipient of many awards and prizes, including the W.H. Smith Award in the United Kingdom and, in the United States, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in Short Fiction, the Lannan Literary Award, and the Rea Award for the Short Story.

In Canada, her prize-winning record is so extraordinary-three Governor General's Awards, two Giller Prizes (one of which was for Runaway), the Trillium Book Award, the Jubilee Prize, and the Libris Award, among many others-that it has been ironically suggested that as such a perennial winner, she no longer qualifies for new prizes. Abroad, acclaim continues to pour in. Both Runaway and Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage won the Commonwealth Writers' Prize Best Book Award, Caribbean and Canada region, and were chosen as one of the Books of the Year by The New York Times.

Alice Munro's stories appear regularly in The New Yorker, as well as in The Atlantic Monthly, Saturday Night, and The Paris Review. She and her husband divide their time between Clinton (in “Alice Munro country”), Ontario, and Comox, British Columbia.

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Alice Munro's profile page

“Munro has an unerring talent for uncovering the extraordinary in the ordinary.”
—Newsweek

“Munro brilliantly captures the initial tremors of this profound social transition.”
—Toronto Star

“Superb.”
—The Independent
“In Munro's work, nothing can be predicted. Emotions erupt. Preconceptions crumble. Surprises proliferate.”
—Margaret Atwood

“Exact and unflinching.”
—The Guardian
“The Nobel laureate’s mastery of the miniature is clear in this early portrait of small-town life.”
—Nicholas Lezard, The Guardian
“She is one of the handful of writers, some living, most dead, whom I have in mind when I say that fiction is my religion.”
—Jonathan Franzen

“She knows us better than we know ourselves. She always has.”
―Washington Times
“Reading Munro's cut-crystal prose is unadulterated pleasure.”
―Daily Telegraph
“A compelling portrait of the artist as a young girl.”
—Maggie Doherty, The Times Literary Supplement

“I love the stories of Alice Munro. There’s something journalistic in her attention to detail, and her ability to evoke a place.”
—Professor Susan Hartman, journalist, and author of City of Refugees