A story collection brimming with hope, adveristy, and wonder, Canada's beloved writer displays her compassionate understanding of ordinary lives to full effect.
The View from Castle Rock traces the generations of Munro's family, from the title story—where through a haze of whiskey Alice's ancestors gaze north from Edinburgh Castle at the Fife coast, believing that it is North America—to Munro's first person stories, set during her lifetime, and all the way to the final story, where we travel with “Alice Munro” today. In the author's words, these stories “pay more attention to the truth of a life than fiction usually does. But not enough to swear on.”

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

“Break[s] every rule ever taught in a writing seminar, setting up a master class along the sidelines. . . . Yet it shows, as usual, how to draw gasps from other writers by defying the laws of gravitas as effortlessly as Michael Jordan defied those of gravity.”
—Pico Iyer, Newsweek Magazine
“Sublime. . . . Late in her career, and late in life, Alice Munro seems unencumbered by the laurels heaped upon her. She continues to charge forward, shining a light on what is most fearsome and true.”
—Jennifer Haigh, Chicago Tribune
“In her astonishing new collection, Munro delves into the past. . . . Result: a far-ranging, richly symphonic suite of stories that outshines even Munro’s earlier masterworks.”
—Michael Upchruch, The Seattle Times
“Munro is the illusionist whose trick can never be exposed. And that is because there is no smoke, there are no mirrors. Munro really does know magic: how to summon the spirits and the emotions that animate our lives.”
—Geraldine Brooks, The Washington Post Book World
“Revelatory. . . . A work of aching authenticity.”
—The Boston Globe
“In it we find a prose that manages something profound (and Chekhovian): to capture the grammar of the perceiving consciousness, to wonder restlessly between apprehensions just as the mind does.”
—The Independent

“Eloquently memorializes our common past and the manner in which it formed us and continues to shape our destinies. . . . In the last century, we have had no better guide than this indispensable author.”
—Kirkus Reviews

“Munro’s genius, as she imagines what is going on inside the closed worlds of individual lives, has to do with her exceptional openness to other people’s words, to the shapes of their understanding and their ways of seeing.”
—Tessa Hadly, London Review of Books