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The View from Castle Rock

Alice Munro

9780099497998

Vintage

Short stories

Paperback

368 pages

$24.95

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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. 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.

By:   Alice Munro
Imprint:   Vintage
Country of Publication:   United Kingdom
Edition:   New edition
Dimensions:   Height: 199mm,  Width: 132mm,  Spine: 23mm
Weight:   258g
ISBN:  

9780099497998


ISBN 10:   0099497999
Pages:   368
Publication Date:   September 2007
Audience:   General
Format:   Paperback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   In stock at Abbey's Bookshop
This is in stock in our store and available now.

Alice Munro is the author of The Beggar Maid (shortlisted for the Booker Prize) a novel, and several outstanding collections of stories, including Open Secrets (winner of the WHSmith Literary Award), Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage and most recentlythe acclaimed Runaway. Her work appears regularly in The New Yorker and she is a winner of the Giller Prize and the Governor General's Prize in her native Canada.

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