This is my first encounter with Munro, and it’s her only novel. I felt similarly about Del Jordan, though for completely different reasons. I was constantly letting go and tumbling into it.” “ All weekend thought of him stayed in my mind like a circus net spread underneath whatever I had to think about. This is my favourite sort of novel: writing that is acute, astute, and beautiful, sugaring deeper questions and messages that take time to ferment and mature. The result is a powerful, moving, and humorous demonstration of Alice Munro's unparalleled awareness of the lives of girls and women. All along she remains a wise, witty observer and recorder of truths in small-town life. Through these unwitting mentors and in her own encounters with sex, birth, and death, Del explores the dark and bright sides of womanhood.

When she begins spending more time in town, she is surrounded by women - her mother, an agnostic, opinionated woman who sells encyclopedias to local farmers her mother's boarder, the lusty Fern Dogherty and her best friend, Naomi, with whom she shares the frustrations and unbridled glee of adolescence. The only novel from Alice Munro - award-winning author of The Love of a Good Woman - is an insightful, honest book, 'autobiographical in form but not in fact,' that chronicles a young girl's growing up in rural Ontario in the 1940s.ĭel Jordan lives out at the end of the Flats Road on her father's fox farm, where her most frequent companions are an eccentric bachelor family friend and her rough younger brother.

Lives of Girls and Women by Alice Munro