Dear Life

What's in this book, at a glance — five things readers want to know before they start.

What this book is about

Alice Munro's final collection — which she announced would be her last book — gathers fourteen stories about the turns that ordinary lives take: marriages that become mysteries, moments of choice that determine everything, the particular texture of mid-century Ontario. The final four pieces, which Munro labels 'not quite stories, not quite autobiography,' are the closest she ever came to memoir: incidents from her own childhood that shaped everything that followed. Munro's prose achieves its characteristic effect of making the ordinary suddenly unbearable in its precision — each story contains a novel's worth of implication in thirty pages.