num_pages: 339
description: In eight new stories, a master of the form extends and magnifies her great themes--the vagaries of love, the passion that leads down unexpected paths, the chaos hovering just under the surface of things, and the strange, often comical desires of the human heart.Time stretches out in some of the stories: a man and a woman look back forty years to the summer they met--the summer, as it turns out, that the true nature of their lives was revealed. In others time is telescoped: a young girl finds in the course of an evening that the mother she adores, and whose fluttery sexuality she hopes to emulate, will not sustain her--she must count on herself.Some choices are made--in a will, in a decision to leave home--with irrevocable and surprising consequences. At other times disaster is courted or barely skirted: when a mother has a startling dream about her baby; when a woman, driving her grandchildren to visit the lakeside haunts of her youth, starts a game that could have dangerous consequences. The rich layering that gives Alice Munro's work so strong a sense of life is particularly apparent in the title story, in which the death of a local optometrist brings an entire town into focus--from the preadolescent boys who find his body, to the man who probably killed him, to the woman who must decide what to do about what she might know. Large, moving, profound--these are stories that extend the limits of fiction.
language: English
title: The Love of a Good Woman
titlecomplete: The Love of a Good Woman
genres: Fiction, Short Stories, Canadian Literature, Canada, Womens, Literature, Nobel Prize, Contemporary, 20th Century, Literary Fiction
ratings_count: 8644
awards: awardedAt: 883641600000
name: Scotiabank Giller Prize, awardedAt: 883641600000
name: National Book Critics Circle Award
category: Fiction, awardedAt: 915177600000
name: Canadian Booksellers Association Libris Award
category: Fiction Book, awardedAt: 915177600000
name: Trillium Book Award, awardedAt: 883641600000
name: Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize
publisher: Alfred A. Knopf