by Alice Munro
First published 2005
Del Jordan lives with her family on a fox farm at the end of Flats Road outside Jubilee, Ontario. Her younger brother and an eccentric bachelor friend share their isolated world. As Del enters adolescence, she begins spending time with the women in town and discovers the complexities of female experience. She navigates sex, birth, and death while watching her encyclopedia-selling mother embarrass her at every turn. Her body develops new desires she cannot control. She tries desperately to fall in love. Del dreams of fame and wants to become a writer. Now an adult living far from Jubilee, she looks back on the seemingly small moments that marked her awkward passage into womanhood. She recalls her childish ambitions with sharp self-awareness and relives the humiliations that shaped her. Through memory, Del examines how the women around her taught her what it meant to grow up female in a small Canadian town.
Genres: fiction, literary-fiction, family-life, 20th-century, coming-of-age, adult-fiction, adolescence, canadian-literature
Vibes: emotional, intimate, lyrical, thought-provoking
Tropes: coming-of-age, unreliable-narrator
Setting: Canada, Jubilee, Ontario
Period: 20th-century
3 pages · Audio CD · BTC Audiobooks