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  • Published: 1 November 2010
  • ISBN: 9781409016755
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 320

Too Much Happiness





2021 sees all of Alice Munro's backlist reissued in a new, modern look. These editions will appeal to a broad range of literary readers

These are beguiling, provocative stories about manipulative men and the women who outwit them.
‘Brimming with intensely believable characters and rich social detail’ Sunday Times

A wife and mother whose spirit has been crushed finds release from her extraordinary pain in the most unlikely of places. The young victim of a humiliating seduction finds an unusual way to get her own back and move on. An older woman, dying of cancer, weaves a poisonous story to save her life. Alice Munro takes on complex, even harrowing emotions and events and renders them into stories that surprise, amaze, and shed light on the unpredictable ways we accommodate to what happens in our lives.

Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature

Winner of the Man Booker International Prize 2009

  • Published: 1 November 2010
  • ISBN: 9781409016755
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 320

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Praise for Too Much Happiness

Alice Munro commands enormous respect and almost uncritical adoration from her readers

Elaine Showalter, Literary Review

Too Much Happiness is her 11th collection, and as brilliant and surprising as any ... who could be better?

Claire Harman, Evening Standard

She has the lightest of touches, with every word seeming entirely necessary, but nothing set in stone....remarkable collection

Lorna Bradbury, Daily Telegraph

Some of the most honest, intuitive and exacting fiction, long or short, of our time

Tom Gatti, The Times

Written with veteran assurance, brimming with intensely believable 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

Munro is famously hard to write about, in part because she's the opposite of the Borges character who joked about belonging not to art but to the history of art. Far from hanging on to the gates of literature, her stories create a powerful illusion of bringing their readers up against unmediated life; and life isn't penetrable by the normal procedures of book reviewing. Is Too Much Happiness as substantial a collection as Runaway (2004) or Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage (2001)? The only sensible answer is to recommend buying all three

Christopher Tayler, The Guardian

She writes with a beautiful clarity, an elemental humanity and a marvellous, limpid, funny, apprehension of what goes on

Jane Shilling, Sunday Telegraph

As strong and vivid as ever... a gift for the humane observation and the specific, plausible detail

Philip Hensher, Spectator

Assured collection from the short-story queen

Sunday Times

Munro's bold, unflinching narratives have taken the short story places many a novelist has feared to tread... That she does this in a style both calm and deliberate, fluid yet tightly controlled, stark yet compassionate, is what makes her insights into the human condition so profound

Mary Crockett, Scotsman
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