by Alice Munro
First published 2014
In "Gravel," a narrator looks back with unshakable clarity at existential torment and disenchantment. The protagonist of "Train" becomes a fugitive passenger, moving through stations that mirror his own experience and that of others, watching life pass by with the detached gaze of someone simply along for the ride. An elderly woman in "In Sight of the Lake" makes a confused journey toward an irretrievable past, her mental pathways leading nowhere she can return to. Munro strips her prose to bone in these stories, drying sentences like stones and paring away everything but what remains necessary. The language becomes spare, elliptical, reduced to its most vital elements. These are the remnants of radioactive material that has illuminated all her stories over sixty years of unrelenting work. What emerges are first and last things, the thread of a fully realized world with the needle finally at rest in the fabric.
Genres: literary-fiction, american-fiction, 20th-century, adult-fiction
Vibes: intimate, lyrical, thought-provoking
Tropes: detached-perspective, unreliable-narrator
Period: 20th-Century
312 pages · Hardcover · Einaudi
Content warnings: mental-illness