These dazzling and utterly satisfying stories explore varieties and degrees of love - filial, platonic, sexual, parental and imagined - in the lives of apparently ordinary folk. In fact, Munro's characters pulse with idiosyncratic life. Under the polished surface of these unsentimental dispatches from the small-town and rural front lies a strong undertow of violence and sexuality, repressed until something snaps, with extraordinary force in some of the stories, sadly and strangely in others. "She has a touch of genius" Mail on Sunday "Whatever it is that makes some writing come alive in every phrase and sentence, Alice Munro has it... I wouldn't willingly miss one of her stories" Sunday Times "Munro has been compared with Proust, shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and remains - though dazzling - quite unperturbed and unaffected, her writing smooth and supple" Financial Times "A work of great brilliance and depth... Munro's power of analysis, of sensation, and thoughts, is almost Proustian in its sureness" New Statesman "Only a few writers continue to create those full-bodied miniature universes of the old school. Some of her short stories are so ample and fulfilling that they feel like novels. They present whole landscapes and cultures, whole families of characters" -- Anne Tyler