The View From Castle Rock: Stories - Softcover

Munro, Alice

3.68

5,190 ratings by Goodreads

9780701179892: The View From Castle Rock: Stories

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0701179899 ISBN 13: 9780701179892

Publisher: Chatto & Windus, 2006

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'Alice Munro has a strong claim to being the best fiction writer now working in North America...She is speaking to you and to me right here, right now.' - Jonathan Franzen. On a clear day, you could see 'America' from Edinburgh's Castle Rock - or so said Alice Munro's great-great-great-grandfather, James Laidlaw, when he had drink taken. Then, in 1818, Laidlaw left the parish of 'no advantages', of banked Presbyterian emotions and uncanny tales - where, like his more famous cousin James Hogg, he was born and bred - and sailed to the new world with his family. This is the story of those shepherds from the Ettrick Valley and their descendants, among them the author herself. They were a Spartan lot, who kept to themselves; showing off was frowned on, and fear was commonplace, at least for females...But opportunities present themselves for two strong-minded women in a ship's close quarters; a father dies, and a baby vanishes en route from Illinois to Canada; another story hints at incest; childhood is short and hazardous. This is family history where imperfect recollections blur into fiction, where the past shows through the present like the tracks of a glacier on a geological map. And woven into it are first-person stories that draw on material from Munro's own life...First love flowers under an apple tree while lust rears its head in a barn; a restless mother with ideas beyond her station declines painfully; a father farms fox fur and turkeys; a clever girl escapes to college and then into a hasty marriage. Beneath the ordinary landscape there's a different story - evocative, frightening, sexy, unexpected, gripping. Alice Munro tells it like no other.

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Review:

"one of my very favourite writers".
-- Claire Tomalin, The Guardian

'Munro's genius... has to do with her exceptional openness to other
people's words'
-- London Review of Books

`customary excellence'. -- Peter Kemp, Sunday Times

"Mesmerising ... a book that is illuminated by the patterns of
life repeating themselves over the years" -- Economist

"Munro proves that the short story should never be deemed the
uninspiring younger sibling of the novel" -- Financial Times

"Something to be seized upon as soul food, pure pleasure,
sustenance." -- Saturday Herald

"This is a deeply moving and contemplative book." -- Irish Times

"the power of Munro's storytelling never falters... This is a
remarkable book." -- Sunday Telegraph

"the pre-eminent master of the short story... all delivered by her
spare, wonderful prose"
-- Independent on Sunday

`elegant' -- Jane Shilling, Sunday Telegraph

From the Publisher:

This is powerful, breathtaking narrative - an enticing, elusive mix of memoir, family history and fiction by one of the greatest living writers. ‘These are stories. You could say that such stories pay more attention to the truth of a life than fiction usually does. But not enough to swear on.’

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