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Published on Dec 13, 2016 | 128 Pages
Alice Munro is cherished for her exquisite, affecting meditations on the human heart. In these three linked stories, “Chance,” “Soon,” and “Silence”—which, together, inspired Pedro Almodóvar’s film Julieta—her virtuosic talents are once again on display. The stories follow a schoolteacher named Juliet as she is swept up by fate: meeting an older man on a train and starting an affair; later, visiting her parents as a young mother; and later still, searching for contact with her estranged daughter.
As with all of Munro’s characters, Juliet radiates warmth, dignity, and hope, even as she is unflinching in the face of betrayal and loss. In Munro’s hands, her journey is as surprising, extraordinary, and precious as life itself.
Author
Alice Munro
ALICE MUNRO grew up in Wingham, Ontario and attended the University of Western Ontario (now Western University), studying journalism and English. Her first collection of stories was published in 1968 as Dance of the Happy Shades, which garnered much acclaim and won the Governor General’s Award for English fiction that year. Three years later, she published her only novel, Lives of Girls and Women. Over the next few decades, she published many more short story collections, including Who Do You Think You Are?; The Moons of Jupiter; Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage, from which a story was later adapted into the two-time Academy Award–winning movie, Away from Her; Runaway; and The View from Castle Rock. Her stories appeared regularly in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and The Paris Review. In 1978 Munro received her second Governor General’s Award for Who Do You Think You Are? and her third in 1986 with The Progress of Love. In 2009 she won the Man Booker International Prize for her lifetime body of work. Her final story collection, Dear Life, came in 2012, and the next year, the same year she retired from writing, she won the Nobel Prize in Literature, hailed as the “master of the contemporary short story.” Munro has also been the recipient of the National Book Critics Circle Award, the W.H. Smith Award, two Giller Prizes, several Trillium Prizes, the Jubilee Prize, and the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize Best Book Award, among many others.Munro died in Millbrook, Ontario, in 2024.
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