Alice Munro was born in 1931 and was the author of thirteen collections of stories and the novel, Lives of Girls and Women. She received many awards and prizes, including three of Canada’s Governor General’s Literary Awards and two Giller Prizes, the Rea Award for the Short Story, the Lannan Literary Award, the WHSmith Book Award in the UK, the National Book Critics Circle Award in the US, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize for Who Do You Think You Are? (previously published as The Beggar Maid), and was awarded the Man Booker International Prize 2009 for her overall contribution to fiction on the world stage, and in 2013 she won the Nobel Prize in Literature. Her stories have appeared in the New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly, Paris Review and other publications, and her collections have been translated into thirteen languages. Alice Munro died in 2024.

"A collection that sees her delving even deeper and with glittering expertise into a fictional terrain she has made her own for 40 years now" -- Peter Kemp Sunday Times "The pre-eminent master of the short story... all delivered by her spare, wonderful prose" -- David Mattin Independent on Sunday "If there is one writer who proves that the short story should never be deemed the uninspiring younger sibling of the novel, it is Munro" -- Melissa McClements Financial Times "This is a deeply moving and contemplative book. If it is a valediction, then it is a magnificent one" -- Mary Morrissy Irish Times "Mesmerising and cleverly interlinked, these stories are well balanced - neither overly inventive nor stolidly factual. Ms Munro's light touch and her sensitive embellishment of the truth result in a book that is illuminated by the patterns of life repeating themselves over the years" Economist