Key themes
- The moment of choice — and the life that branches from it
- Memory's unreliability and its particular kind of truth
- The ordinary life that contains everything
About this book
Quietly profound stories of small-town lives by a Nobel laureate and master of the form.
Munro's final collection, published in 2012, was the last of her work before she retired from writing. She won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2013. Munro is widely considered the greatest living master of the short story form.
Discussion questions
- Munro's stories are notable for their temporal range — a single story might cover fifty years in a few pages. How does she compress time — and what does this technique say about how experience accumulates?
- The final four stories are described as 'autobiographical in feeling, though not, sometimes, entirely so in fact.' What is Munro doing with this qualified truth-claim?
- Many of Munro's characters are women constrained by the mid-20th century world they inhabit. How does she present this constraint — as tragedy, as resignation, or something more complex?
- The title story ends with one of the most surprising and quietly devastating passages in the collection. What does it reveal — and why does Munro leave it for last?
- Munro won the Nobel Prize largely on the strength of her short stories. What does the short story form allow her to do that a novel could not?
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