Away from Her - (Vintage International) by Alice Munro (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

From Nobel Prize-winning author Alice Munro, "a true master of the form" (Salman Rushdie), comes the brilliant short story that inspired the major motion picture starring Julie Christie and Gordon Pinsent--featuring a Preface from Sarah Polley

"I've always loved Alice Munro's writing, but this story punctured something. I read it, stunned, and let it sit there. It seemed to enter like a bullet. So concise and unsentimental, nothing to cushion the blow of its impact. When I was finished, I couldn't stop weeping."--Sarah Polley, from the Preface

Alice Munro has long been heralded for her penetrating, lyrical prose, and in "The Bear Came Over the Mountain"--the basis for Sarah Polley's film Away from Her--her prodigious talents are once again on display. As she follows Grant, a retired professor whose wife, Fiona, begins gradually to drift away from him, we slowly see how a lifetime of intimate details can create a marriage, and how mysterious the bonds of love really are.

Review Quotes

Praise for Alice Munro

"Munro has a strong claim to being the best fiction writer now working in North America."--Jonathan Franzen, The New York Times Book Review

"Her work felt revolutionary when I came to it, and it still does."--Jhumpa Lahiri

"The authority she brings to the page is just lovely."--Elizabeth Strout

"She's the most savage writer I've ever read, also the most tender, the most honest, the most perceptive."--Jeffery Eugenides

"Alice Munro can move characters through time in a way that no other writer can."--Julian Barnes

"She is a short-story writer who . . . reimagined what a story can do."--Lorrie Moore

"There's probably no one alive who's better at the craft of the short story."--Jim Shepard

"A true master of the form."--Salman Rushdie

"A wonderful writer."--Joyce Carol Oates

About the Author

Alice Munro is the author of thirteen collections of stories--including Dear Life, Runaway, and Too Much Happiness--as well as a novel, Lives of Girls and Women. Among the many awards and prizes she received are three Governor General's Literary Awards and two Giller Prizes in Canada; the Rea Award; the Lannan Literary Award; the National Book Critics Circle Award; and the International Booker Prize. Her stories have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The Paris Review, and other publications, and her collections have been translated into thirteen languages. She was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2013. Alice Munro died in 2024.