Product Description

On a clear day, you could see 'America' from Edinburgh's Castle Rock - or so said Alice Munro's great-great-great-grandfather, James Laidlaw, when he had drink taken. Then, in 1818, Laidlaw left the parish of 'no advantages', of banked Presbyterian emotions and uncanny tales - where, like his more famous cousin James Hogg, he was born and bred - and sailed to the new world with his family. This is the story of those shepherds from the Ettrick Valley and their descendants, among them the author herself. They were a Spartan lot, who kept to themselves; showing off was frowned on, and fear was commonplace, at least for females ...But opportunities present themselves for two strong-minded women in a ship's close quarters; a father dies, and a baby vanishes en route from Illinois to Canada; another story hints at incest; childhood is short and hazardous. This is family history where imperfect recollections blur into fiction, where the past shows through the present like the tracks of a glacier on a geological map. First love flowers under an apple tree while lust rears its head in a barn; a restless mother with ideas beyond her station declines painfully; a father farms fox fur and turkeys; a clever girl escapes to college and then into a hasty marriage. Beneath the ordinary landscape there's a different story - evocative, frightening, sexy, unexpected, gripping. Alice Munro tells it like no other.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #5227 in Books
• Published on: 2007-09-06
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 368 pages

Sunday Telegraph
'one of the best short-story writers in the English language...her writing [is] as unassumingly powerful, as ever'

Daily Express
`Evocative and gripping'

Observer
'The story comes to focus on Munro herself, moving skilfully from historical sepia to the full colour of intimate recollection'

Customer Reviews

revelation
this is the first book I ever read from Alice Munro, bought without too much thinking in an airport shop. I started it and have not been able to put it down, although I wanted to read slowly to make it last. The stories flow one into the next and captured my imagination and emotions. The story connects Scotland to Canada, across generations family and word events. The language is magical, of elegant simplicity. I love this book, and I cannot wait to read more from her.

Munro's View
When I was a university student in Canada, a professor told me it was very likely Alice Munro would be the first Canadian to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. All her short story collections were considered brilliant by the critics, to the point where she was hailed the - arguably - best short story writer alive. This latest collection of short stories goes some way in proving this notion. As a departure from what she has done before, this collection is an exploration of her ancestor's lives in Scotland, their move to Canada, and her own life experience growing up in rural Ontario. She looks at the way we tell stories to keep our connections to the past alive, and how these stories sometimes disappear. But, to complicate things, she plays a neat trick by mixing fact with fiction while still seducing the reader into believing it's all true.

This was an easy and enjoyable read, but not all stories were successful. I loved the story about her ancestors crossing the Atlantic, and her life as a young girl; but often I found my concentration drifting away as she waxed elegiacally about the utensils in someone's kitchen, or the trees surrounding a neighbouring farm. Nevertheless, this is Alice Munro, i.e. these stories are still far better than most stuff out there. Her insights into people's lives, no matter how restricted or simple they may be, are full of wisdom. Like her compatriot Margaret Atwood, she comes across as a lady you'd like to have a coffee with and chat for hours.

An excellent mix of fact and fiction.
Munro has taken what she knows of her family history and woven it into an imagined version of the past. She explains in the Foreword that in every generation of her family there was someone who "went in for writing long, outspoken, sometimes outrageous letters, and detailed recollections."

The Laidlaws emigrated to Canada from Scotland in 1818 and the first part of the book is about their journey across the Atlantic and their early years as settlers. The title of the book comes from a story about Andrew who when he was ten was taken by his father to see the view from Edinburgh's Castle Rock. His father, who wanted to emigrate to America, told him that the land they could see in the mist was America.

Of course it was not America and Andrew knew that. But it was years later before he realised that he'd been looking at Fife!

Story follows story as the years pass spanning several generations of the Laidlaw family moving forward to the present generation - Munro herself. I found the second half of the book even better than the first as she tells of her parents and their hard working lives. Her father bred silver foxes and before she became ill her mother made their pelts into scarves to sell to American tourists. Munro then relates stories based on her own life. These are first person stories based on personal material but as she puts it in an

"austere or rigorously factual way. I put myself at the center and wrote about that self as searchingly as I could. But the figures around this self took on their own life and color and did things they had not done in reality. ... In fact, some of these characters have moved so far from their beginnings that I cannot remember who they were to start with.

These are stories.

You could say that such stories pay more attention to the truth of a life than fiction usually does. But not enough to swear on. And the part of this book that might be called family history has expanded into fiction, but always within the outline of a true narrative."

Fact or fiction this is a fascinating book.