The View From Castle Rock

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.

About The Author:

About the Author

Born Alice Laidlaw, Alice Munro grew up in Wingham, Ontario, and attended the University of Western Ontario in Canada. An avid writer from an early age, she is a particularly skillful and gifted author of short stories. Her first collection, Dance of the Happy Shades (1968), won a Governor General's Award. Her two novels, Lives of Girls and Women (1971) and the Beggar Maid (1978) are collections of episodes in the life of the central character, with each chapter reading as a separate story. Munro's work is concerned with women's relationships, usually ordinary women or girls living in rural Ontario towns. She is especially interested in the tension between society's expectations and women's actual feelings. Munro is widely anthologized and highly regarded by U.S. and Canadian critics.