Books › Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage
Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage
519 pages
A masterful, quiet excavation of the human heart, revealing the profound mysteries hidden within ordinary lives and long marriages.
What it feels like
Reading this collection feels like sitting quietly in a room while the entire spectrum of human experience unfolds before you. The pace is steady and deliberate, asking you to slow down and savor the immense weight carried by seemingly ordinary moments. There is an autumnal, reflective mood that permeates these pages, wrapped in a tone that is fiercely observant yet deeply empathetic. The prose is a marvel of precision—deceptively plainspoken but capable of delivering sudden, breathtaking emotional blows. It is a book for readers who relish psychological complexity and the messy, unspoken truths of domestic life. You will find yourself lingering over the quiet tragedies and unexpected graces of these characters, haunted by how perfectly they mirror the mysteries of our own lives.
- Mood
- melancholic
- intimate
- reflective
- autumnal
- Tone
- unsentimental
- observant
- empathetic
- wry
- penetrating
- Pace
- steady
- Themes
- complexities of marriage · passage of time · hidden desires · aging and memory · quiet tragedies
- The writing
- Deceptively simple and sharply precise, weaving decades of history and complex psychology into luminous, unsparing sentences.
- The arc
- Begins with the quiet rhythms of domestic routine and slowly peels back the layers to reveal profound, often devastating emotional truths.
- Who it's for
- Lovers of masterful short fiction who crave deep psychological insight and unsentimental explorations of human frailty.
Content notes
- dementia and memory loss
- infidelity
- aging and mortality
- grief
About the book
Alice Munro has long been heralded for her penetrating, lyrical prose, and in "The Bear Came Over the Mountain" -- the basis for Sarah Polley's film Away From Her -- her prodigious talents are once again on display. As she follows Grant, a retired professor whose wife Fiona begins gradually to lose her memory and drift away from him, we slowly see how a lifetime of intimate details can create a marriage, and how mysterious the bonds of love really are.From the Trade Paperback edition.
Description from Open Library.
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