The View from Castle Rock » (~)

Alice Munro is hardly the typical writer of love stories. Throughout her more than fifty-year career, she has never pandered to an audience used to happy endings and perfect relationships. Instead, she writes with a maturity and honesty that reveals the true nature of love in all its heartbreaking complexity.

Alice Munro mines her rich family background, melding it with her own experiences and the transforming power of her brilliant imagination, to create perhaps her most powerful and personal collection yet.

A young boy, taken to Edinburgh’s Castle Rock to look across the sea to America, catches a glimpse of his father’s dream. Scottish immigrants experience love and loss on a journey that leads them to rural Ontario. Wives, mothers, fathers, and children move through uncertainty, ambivalence, and contemplation in these stories of hopes, adversity, and wonder. The View from Castle Rock reveals what is most essential in Munro’s art: her compassionate understanding of ordinary lives.

The New York Times - A. O. Scott

Again and again, Munro pieces together narratives out of frayed, handed-down material, including her own recollections and those of her mother and father, paying special attention to the details of small-town and rural life. Some of these stories—"Lying Under the Apple Tree," about an early romance, and "Hired Girl," about a term of service with a wealthy family vacationing on an island up north—are as shapely and satisfying as any she has written.

Foreword

Part One / No Advantages
No Advantages The View from Castle Rock Illinois The Wilds of Morris Township Working for a Living

Part Two / Home
Fathers Lying Under the Apple Tree Hired Girl The Ticket Home What Do You Want to Know For?

Epilogue
Messenger