Synopses & Reviews
In these eight tales, Munro evokes the devastating power of old love suddenly recollected. She tells of vanished schoolgirls and indentured frontier brides and an eccentric recluse who, in the course of one surpassingly odd dinner party, inadvertently lands herself a wealthy suitor from exotic Australia. And Munro shows us how one woman's romantic tale of capture and escape in the high Balkans may end up inspiring another woman who is fleeing a husband and lover in present-day Canada.
Review
"Open Secrets is a book that dazzles with its faith in language and in life." New York Times Book Review
About the Author
Alice Munro grew up in Wingham, Ontario, and attended the University of Western Ontario. She has published eleven new collections of stories: Dance of the Happy Shades; Something I've Been Meaning to Tell You; The Beggar Maid; The Moons of Jupiter; The Progress of Love; Friend of My Youth; Open Secrets; The Love of a Good Woman; Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage; Runaway; and a volume of Selected Stories as well as a novel, Lives of Girls and Women.
During her distinguished career she has been the recipient of many awards and prizes, including the Man Booker International Prize, three of Canada's Governor General's Literary Awards and two of its Giller Prizes, the Rea Award for the Short Story, the Lannan Literary Award, England's W. H. Smith Book Award, the United States' National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Edward MacDowell Medal in literature. Her stories have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, The Paris Review, and other publications, and her collections have been translated into thirteen languages.
Alice Munro divides her time between Clinton, Ontario, near Lake Huron, and Comox, British Columbia.
Reading Group Guide
The questions, discussion topics, and author biography that follow are intended to enhance your group's reading of Alice Munro's Open Secrets. Alice Munro is an acknowledged master of the short story, and her newest collection has garnered the very highest praise. Most of the eight stories in Open Secrets take place in Munro's native Canada and particularly in the small Ontario town of Carstairs. Munro's exploration of her characters' varied lives reveals entire worlds of passion, joy, despair--even exoticism and adventure--beneath exteriors that are often deceptively mundane.