"Disregard that tricky word “novel” on the cover; these are short stories through and through. Lives of Girls and Women is pure, vintage Alice Munro. (The stories here do all share the same narrator - which, if you’re new to Munro or wary of short stories, make this an excellent introduction to one of the form’s greatest living masters.) The first story opens when our narrator is a little girl; the final story ends the summer she graduates from high school. The intervening tales stay in the same rural Canadian town and roam the classic Munrovian themes: the ties between mothers and daughters, husbands and wives, neighbors and outsiders, lovers, friends.
I first Lives of Girls and Women in one sitting. Since then, I find myself returning to it and dipping back in every few months. It shatters me and buoys me up every time."
Publisher Vintage
Publication Date 2001-02-13
Section Fiction / All Staff Suggestions / Fiction Suggestions / Archived Staff Suggestions / Liz S.
Format Paperback
ISBN 9780375707490
WINNER OF THE NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE 2013
The only novel from Alice Munro-award-winning author of The Love of a Good Woman--is an insightful, honest book, "autobiographical in form but not in fact," that chronicles a young girl's growing up in rural Ontario in the 1940's.
Del Jordan lives out at the end of the Flats Road on her father's fox farm, where her most frequent companions are an eccentric bachelor family friend and her rough younger brother. When she begins spending more time in town, she is surrounded by women-her mother, an agnostic, opinionted woman who sells encyclopedias to local farmers; her mother's boarder, the lusty Fern Dogherty; and her best friend, Naomi, with whom she shares the frustrations and unbridled glee of adolescence.
Through these unwitting mentors and in her own encounters with sex, birth, and death, Del explores the dark and bright sides of womanhood. All along she remains a wise, witty observer and recorder of truths in small-town life. The result is a powerful, moving, and humorous demonstration of Alice Munro's unparalleled awareness of the lives of girls and women.
