Wenlock Edge   My mother had a bachelor cousin who used to visit us on the farm once a summer. He brought along his mother, Aunt Nell Botts. His own name was Ernie Botts. He was a tall, florid man with a good-natured expression, a big square face, and fair curly hair springing straight up from his forehead. His hands, his fingernails, were as clean as soap, and his hips were a little plump. My name for him—when he was not around—was Earnest Bottom. I had a mean tongue.   But I believed I meant no harm. Hardly any harm. After Aunt Nell Botts died he did not come anymore but sent a Christmas card.   When I went to university in London—that is in London, Ontario—where he lived, he started a custom of taking me out to dinner every other Sunday evening. It seemed to me that this was the sort of thing he would do, because I was a relative—he would not even have to consider whether we were suited to spending time together. He always took me to the same place, a restaurant called the Old Chelsea, which was upstairs, looking down on Dundas Street. It had velvet curtains, white tablecloths, little rose-shaded lamps on the tables. It probably cost more than he could afford, but I did not think of that, having a country girl''s notion that all men who lived in cities, wore a suit every day, and sported such clean fingernails had reached a level of prosperity where indulgences like this were the usual thing.   I had the most exotic offerin

“This book can make your skin crawl with its uncoverings of the transitoriness and precariousness of comfortable everyday existence…a masterpiece of plotting… Written with veteran assurance, brimming with intensely believeable characters and rich social detail, these dispatches from the most unsparing reaches of Munro’s imagination confirm her acclaimed place on the highest ground of contemporary fiction” — Peter Kemp, Sunday Times “She has the lightest of touches, with every word seeming entirely necessary” — Lorna Bradbury, Telegraph Review “Alice Munro’s latest collection of short stories reaffirms her as a writer of piercing insight… Some of the most honest, intuitive and exacting fiction, long or short, of our time” — Tom Gatti, The Times “She is one of the grandees of English-language short fiction…Her prose is clean, precise and unmannered…she gives the impression of being able to make the form do pretty much anything she wants” — Christopher Taylor, Saturday Guardian “She writes with a beautiful, mathematical clarity, an elemental humanity and a marvellous, limpid, funny apprehension of what goes on” — Jane Shilling Telegraph “There is a substantial quality to Munro’s stories that makes you feel you have stumbled on an entire world, but have been given only a peek into the protagonists’ lives, which will continue apace w

Now 78, Alice Munro grew up in Wingham, Ontario, and attended the University of Western Ontario. She has published fourteen previous books — Dance of the Happy Shades ; Lives of Girls and Women , Something I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You ; Who Do You Think You Are? ; The Moons of Jupiter ; The Progress of Love ; Friend of My Youth ; Open Secrets ; Selected Stories ; The Love of a Good Woman ; Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage ; Runaway ; The View from Castle Rock ; and Alice Munro’s Best . During her distinguished career she has been the recipient of many awards and prizes, including the recent Man Booker International Prize given to her in Dublin for “a body of work that has contributed to an achievement in fiction on the world stage.” Here at home she has won too many awards to list, including three Governor General’s Literary Awards, two Giller Prizes, several Trillium Prizes and a number of Libris Awards. Elsewhere she has won the Rea Award for the Short Story, the Lannan Literary Award, England’s W. H. Smith Book Award, Italy’s Pescara prize, the United States’ National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Edward MacDowell Medal in literature. Her stories have appeared in The New Yorker , The Atlantic Monthly , Saturday Night , The Paris Review , and other publications, and her collections have been translated into thirteen languages. Alice Munro divides her time between Clinton, Ontario, and Comox, Brit