Carried Away. A Personal Selection of Stories; Everyman, 2008

Carried Away is a dazzling selection of stories – seventeen favourites chosen by the author from across her distinguished career. Alice Munro has been repeatedly hailed as one of our greatest living writers, a reputation that has been growing for years. The stories brought together here span a quarter of a century, drawn from some of her earliest books, The Beggar Maid and The Moons of Jupiter, through her recent best-selling collection, Runaway. Here are such favourites as ‘Royal Beatings’, in which a young girl, her father, and her stepmother release the tension of their circumstances in a ritual of punishment and reconciliation; ‘Friend of My Youth’, in which a woman comes to understand that her difficult mother is not so very different from herself; and ‘The Love of a Good Woman’, in which, when an old crime resurfaces, a woman has to choose whether to believe in the man she intends to marry. Munro’s incomparable empathy for her characters, the depth of her understanding of human nature, and the grace and surprise of her narrative add up to a richly layered and capacious fiction. Like the World War I soldier in the title story, whose letters from the front to a small-town librarian he doesn’t know change her life for ever, Munro’s unassuming characters insinuate themselves into our hearts and take permanent hold.