Too Much Happiness
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3.9 • 47 Ratings
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
A “profound and beautiful” (Francine Prose, O: The Oprah Magazine) collection of ten stories from Nobel Prize–winning author Alice Munro
“Filled with subtle and far-reaching thematic reverberations. . . . Munro has an empathy so pitch-perfect . . . you are drawn deftly into another world.”—The New York Times Book Review
A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: The New York Times Book Review, The Atlantic Monthly, The Boston Globe, Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Chicago Tribune, Kansas City Star, The Economist, Slate
With clarity and ease, Alice Munro renders complex, difficult events and emotions into stories about the unpredictable ways in which men and women accommodate and often transcend what happens in their lives.
In the first story, a young wife and mother, suffering from the unbearable pain of losing her three children, gains solace from a most surprising source. In another, a young woman, in the aftermath of an unusual and humiliating seduction, reacts in a clever if less-than-admirable fashion. Other tales uncover the “deep-holes” in a marriage, the unsuspected cruelty of children, and, in the title story, the yearnings of a nineteenth-century female mathematician.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Munro's latest collection is satisfyingly true to form and demonstrates why she continues to garner laurels (such as this year's Man Booker International Prize). Through carefully crafted situations, Munro breathes arresting life into her characters, their relationships and their traumas. In "Wenlock Edge," a college student in London, Ontario, acquires a curious roommate in Nina, who tricks the narrator into a revealing dinner date with Nina's paramour, the significantly older Mr. Purvis. "Child's Play," a dark story about children's capacity for cruelty and the longevity of their secrets, introduces two summer camp friends, Marlene and Charlene, who form a pact against the slightly disturbing Verna, whose family used to share Marlene's duplex. The title, and final, story, the collection's longest and most ambitious, takes the reader to 19th-century Europe to meet Sophia Kovalevski, a talented mathematician and novelist who grapples with the politics of the age and the consequences of success. While this story lacks some of the effortlessness found in Munro's finest work, the collection delivers what she's renowned for: poignancy, flesh and blood characters and a style nothing short of elegant.
