by Alice Munro
First published 2012
Rose hears the same cutting question throughout her childhood in West Hanratty: "Who do you think you are?" Her stepmother Flo asks it most often, this practical yet vulgar woman who embodies everything provincial that Rose wants to escape. Rose rebels and studies hard, but she cannot fully break free. The ten connected stories follow her across forty years. She endures beatings from her silent father and loses herself in Shakespeare and Dickens while caring for him during his illness. As a teenager traveling to Toronto, she experiences a disturbing sexual encounter with a minister. She wins a university scholarship and falls for Patrick Blatchford, a history graduate student who seems to adore her. Marriage follows, then an extramarital affair that ends bitterly. She becomes a nervous mother to a daughter wiser than herself. Finally, as a mature woman, Rose returns home to find Flo near death and ready for a nursing home. In Flo's unchanged harsh tone, Rose discovers the unbroken thread of her inner life and remembers the one love she never spoke about.
Genres: literary-fiction, american-fiction, 20th-century, coming-of-age, adult-fiction, family-drama
Vibes: emotional, intimate, thought-provoking
Tropes: coming-of-age, family-drama, unreliable-narrator
Setting: West Hanratty, Toronto
Period: 20th-century
274 pages · Hardcover · Einaudi
Content warnings: abuse, domestic-violence, physical-abuse