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Synopsis

On a clear day, you could see ‘America’ from Edingburgh’s Castle Rock.

Or so said Alice Munro’s great-great-great-grandfather, James Laidlaw, when he had drink taken. Then, in 1818, Laidlaw left a Scottish valley of banked Presbyterian emotions and uncanny tales – where, like his more famous cousin James Hogg, he was born and bred – and sailed to the new world with his family. This is the story of those Ettrick shepherds and their descendants, among them the author herself.  They were a Spartan lot, who kept to themselves; showing off was frowned on, and fear was commonplace, at least for females…

But opportunities present themselves for two strong-minded women in a ship’s close quarters; a father dies and a baby vanishes en route from Illinois to Canada; childhood is short and hazardous even in the twentieth century. This is family history where imperfect recollections blur into fiction, where the past shows through the present like the tracks of a glacier on a geological map. And woven into it are first-person stories that draw on material from Munro’s own life. First love flowers under an apple tree while lust rears its head in a barn; a restless mother with ideas beyond her station declines slowly and painfully; a father farms fox fur and turkeys; a cleaver girl escapes to college and then into marriage.

Beneath the ordinary landscape there’s a different story – evocative, frightening, sexy, unexpected, gripping. Alice Munro tells it like no other. ‘These are stories. You could say that such stories pay more attention to the truth of a life than fiction usually does. But not enough to swear on.’ This is powerful, breathtaking narrative by one of the greatest living writers.

Press Reviews

'Alice Munro has a strong claim to being the best fiction writer now working in North America… She is speaking to you and to me right here, right now' - Jonathan Franzen

'Munro has a genius for evoking the particular and peculiar atmosphere of relationships, their unspoken pressures and expectations' - Alan Hollinghurst, Guardian

'Alice Munro is one of the most consistently true writers of fiction working in the English language today. She is a sculptor of the human condition: nothing more and nothing less than an artist' - Melanie McGrath, Evening Standard

'Munro’s stories enact what can only be called a sort of magic… These beautiful stories [Runaway] combine the coolness of objectivity and the intense heat of the just-opened heart' - Ali Smith, Scotsman

'Alice Munro is one of the great storytellers of our time, descended from a line going back to Chekhov and Katherine Mansfield… Munro is very good on love…[She] is equally good on the lust and sex that precede love…’ - Michéle Roberts, Financial Times

About the author

Alice Munro (neé Laidlaw), is the author of many outstanding and award-winning collections of stories, including most recently the universally acclaimed Runway and Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage, as well as The Beggar Maid (shortlisted for the Booker Prize) and Open Secrets (winner of the W H Smith Literary Award). Her work appears regularly in the New Yorker, and she has twice won the Giller Prize and the Governor General’s Award in her native Canada. Her ancestors came from the Ettrick Valley in the Scottish Borders, and she lives in Ontario.