The Harvard Square Book Circle

The Harvard Square Book Circle, our in-store book club, will discuss National Book Circle Critics Award winner Alice Munro's book, Hateship Friendship Courtship Loveship Marriage.

In the nine breathtaking stories that make up her celebrated tenth collection, Alice Munro achieves new heights, creating narratives that loop and swerve like memory, and conjuring up characters as thorny and contradictory as people we know ourselves.

A tough-minded housekeeper jettisons the habits of a lifetime because of a teenager’s practical joke. A college student visiting her brassy, unconventional aunt stumbles on an astonishing secret and its meaning in her own life. An incorrigible philanderer responds with unexpected grace to his wife’s nursing-home romance. Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage is Munro at her best, tirelessly observant, serenely free of illusion, deeply and gloriously humane.

“One of the foremost practitioners of the art of the short story. . . . These tales have the intimacy of a family photo album and the organic feel of real life.” –The New York Times