The Love of a Good Woman
Alice Munro
The stories in The Love of a Good Woman take us back to familiar Munro territory: capturing the emotional largeness of small-town life. From haunted people trying to keep deathbed promises to the exposure of potentially damaging secrets among family members, these eight stories span decades, and subtly explore the sense of estrangement and emotional isolation many of us struggle with. They also reveal how grief and guilt can forge deep connections between people.
The Love of a Good Woman won the 1998 Giller Prize and was a contender for Canada Reads 2004, when it was defended by Measha Brueggergosman. Alice Munro was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2013.
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From the book
This place was called Jutland. There had been a mill once, and some kind of small settlement, but that had all gone by the end of the last century, and the place had never amounted to much at any time. Many people believed that it had been named in honor of the famous sea battle fought during the First World War, but actually everything had been in ruins before that battle ever took place.
The three boys who came out here on a Saturday morning early in the spring of 1951 believed, as most children did, that the name came from the old wooden planks that jutted out of the earth of the riverbank and from the other straight thick boards that stood in the nearby water, making an uneven palisade.
From The Love of a Good Woman by Alice Munro ©1998. Published by McClelland & Stewart.
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