Carried Away is a dazzling selection of stories–seventeen favorites chosen by the author from across her distinguished career.

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 Royal Beatings in which a young girl, her father, and stepmother release the tension of their circumstances in a ritual of punishment and reconciliation; Friend of My Youth in which a woman comes to understand that her difficult mother is not so very different from herself; and The Albanian Virgin, a romantic tale of capture and escape in Central Europe that may or may not be true, told by an elderly married woman to her younger friend 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.

Condition: Pre-loved book. Minor yellowing of pages. Otherwise in good condition.

Format: Hardcover
Year published: 2006
Pages: 559
Sub-genre: Short stories, literary fiction.
Imprint: Everyman's Library