Carried Away: A Selection of Stories (Everyman's Library)

WINNER OF THE NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE 2013

Carried Away is a dazzling selection of stories€“seventeen favorites chosen by the author from across her distinguished career. With an Introduction by Margaret Atwood.

Alice Munro has been repeatedly hailed as one of our greatest living writers, a reputation that has been growing for years. The stories brought together here span a quarter century, drawn from some of her earliest books, The Beggar Maid and The Moons of Jupiter, through her recent best-selling collection, Runaway. 

Here are such favorites as €œRoyal Beatings€ in which a young girl, her father, and stepmother release the tension of their circumstances in a ritual of punishment and reconciliation; €œFriend of My Youth€ in which a woman comes to understand that her difficult mother is not so very different from herself; and €œThe Albanian Virgin," a romantic tale of capture and escape in Central Europe that may or may not be true but that nevertheless comforts the hearer, who is on a desperate adventure of her own.

Munro€s incomparable empathy for her characters, the depth of her understanding of human nature, and the grace and surprise of her narrative add up to a richly layered and capacious fiction. Like the World War I soldier in the title story, whose letters from the front to a small-town librarian he doesn€t know change her life forever, Munro€s unassuming characters insinuate themselves in our hearts and take permanent hold.