Hateship Friendship Courtship Loveshi

NATIONAL BESTSELLER From Nobel Prizewinning author Alice Munro come nine short stories with the intimacy of a family photo album and the organic feel of real life (The New York Times)In Munros hands as in Chekhovs a short story is more than big enough to hold the worldand to astonish us again and again.Chicago TribuneFINALIST FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD A TIME BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR ONE OF THE NEW YORK TIMESS 100 BEST BOOKS OF THE 21ST CENTURYIn the nine breathtaking stories that make up this collection Alice Munro creates narratives that loop and swerve like memory conjuring up characters as thorny and contradictory as people we know ourselves.The fate of a strong-minded housekeeper with a frizz of reddish hair just entering the dangerous country of old-maidhood is unintentionally (and deliciously) reversed by a teenaged girls practical joke. A college student visiting her aunt for the first time and recognizing the family furniture stumbles on a long-hidden secret and its meaning in her own life. An inveterate philanderer finds the tables turned when he puts his wife into an old-age home. A young cancer patient stunned by good news discovers a perfect bridge to her suddenly regained future. A woman recollecting an afternoons wild lovemaking with a stranger realizes how the memory of that encounter has both changed for her and sustained her through a lifetime.Hateship Friendship Courtship Loveship Marriage is Munro at her besttirelessly observant serenely free of illusion deeply and gloriously humane.