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  • Published: 2 March 2015
  • ISBN: 9781784700881
  • Imprint: Vintage
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 336
  • RRP: $22.99

Lives of Girls and Women




Moving, ribald and semi-autobiographical, Lives of Girls and Women is the only novel from Alice Munro, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature

The only novel from bestselling author Alice Munro, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature

Catching frogs, grazing knees, singing songs to save England from Hitler - that was childhood for Del Jordan, and now she's impatient for more.

More than she can find in the encyclopedias sold by her mother, or in the half-understood innuendos dispensed by best friend Naomi, or in the whispers of boys during Friday night dances.

Just like the girls in the movies, she wants to get started on real life.

In her only novel, Alice Munro turns her eye to the frustrations, embarrassments, glee and bewilderment of adolescence, and to the brushes with sex, death, violence and birth that shape the lives of girls and women.

'I am the perfect audience for her brand of quiet, seething feminism'
Lena Dunham

'Superb'
Independent
'In Munro's work, nothing can be predicted. Emotions erupt. Preconceptions crumble. Surprises proliferate'
Margaret Atwood

'Exact and unflinching'
Guardian
'She is one of the handful of writers, some living, most dead, whom I have in mind when I say that fiction is my religion'
Jonathan Franzen

  • Published: 2 March 2015
  • ISBN: 9781784700881
  • Imprint: Vintage
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 336
  • RRP: $22.99

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Praise for Lives of Girls and Women

Her prose is exact and unflinching, coolly anatomising vengeful grudges, dark crimes and curdled emotions

Guardian

Munro is so good that one gropes for superlatives

Daily Telegraph

She is one of the handful of writers, some living, most dead, whom I have in mind when I say that fiction is my religion

Jonathan Franzen

In Munro's work, nothing can be predicted. Emotions erupt. Preconceptions crumble. Surprises proliferate

Margaret Atwood

I still feel that Alice Munro is mine. I am the perfect audience for her brand of quiet, seething feminism

Lena Dunham

She knows us better than we know ourselves. She always has

Washington Times

Reading Munro's cut-crystal prose is unadulterated pleasure

Daily Telegraph

The Nobel laureate’s mastery of the miniature is clear in this early portrait of small-town life

Nicholas Lezard, Guardian

Superb. Its dense weave of colour and texture offers manifold witty surprises and the poetry of place that is the hallmark of Munro’s stories

Steve Davies, Independent

A compelling portrait of the artist as a young girl

Maggie Doherty, The Times Literary Supplement

If you’ve not come across it before, grab a copy pronto

Valerie O’Riordan, Book Munch

This book shows Munro’s gift for finding the extraordinary in the everyday

Good Book Guide

An enriching and rewarding read

Cambridge News

In the simplest of words, and with the greatest of power, she makes us see and hear an ‘unremarkable’ scene we will never forget

Hermione Lee, New York Review of Books

A subtle portrait of a mother and daughter growing into one another.

Moya Crockett, Stylist