There is a remarkable magic in these eight matchless stories—stories set in Ontario, Australia, Europe; in dangerous mountains, forbidding wilderness, familiar towns. In the title story, a lawyer’s wife has a flash of insight—illogical, unprovable, and terrifying—into the fate of a missing teenager; in another, the appearance of a long-dead visitor reveals the grip of a former love. Munro tells of vanished schoolgirls and indentured frontier brides and an eccentric recluse who, in the course of one surpassingly odd dinner party, inadvertently lands herself a wealthy suitor.

Yet the true magic lies in the way that Alice Munro makes everything here—unexpected marriages, elopements, acts of sudden vengeance—unfold with the ease of the inevitable. This is the mark of a great writer, and it is stamped on every page of this book.

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

“One of the finest short story writers now working. . . . Open Secrets is a triumph.” —Chicago Tribune

“A book that dazzles with its faith in language and life.” —The New York Times

“A superb collection. . . . Marriage, gambles, disappearances, motiveless vandalism—it is the stuff of unremarkable lives, conveyed in a remarkable fashion.” —The Independent (UK)

“You’ll want to luxuriate in [Munro’s] gorgeous prose again and again.” —Kirkus Reviews

“Open Secrets by the wonderful Alice Munro, is a collection of short stories, written with exquisite style.” —Joanna Trollope

“She is our Chekhov, and is going to outlast most of her contemporaries.” —Cynthia Ozick

“Brilliant at evoking life’s diversity and unpredictability, [Alice Munro is] an unrivalled chronicler of human nature.” —The Sunday Times (UK)

“An Alice Munro story zooms effortlessly through time zones, spans generations and offers up more detail and description than do many full-length contemporary novels.” —Maclean’s

“She is the best fiction writer in North America.” —The Vancouver Sun