Description

A forged love letter sends a housekeeper on a quest across Canada when a cruel prank has unintended consequences.

In the title story, a prank involving forged letters sends practical housekeeper Johanna Parry across Canada toward a life nobody intended for her. Elsewhere, women and men look back at marriages, first mistakes, old desires and private shame, finding that memories can contain omissions as powerful as what it preserves.

Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage is a masterly literary short story collection about love, deception, domestic life and aging. For readers seeking literary psychological stories and writing that combines irony with deep compassion, Munro remains exact, fearless and humane.

‘Munro gives each of her stories the rich density of a compacted novel…triumphantly displays impressive feats of flexibility, always gracefully adapted to life’s twists and turns’ Sunday Times

Publisher Review

In these stories lives come into focus through single events or sudden memories which bring the past bubbling to the surface. The past, as Alice Munro's characters discover, is made up not only of what is remembered, but also what isn't. The past is there, just out of the picture, but if memories haven't been savoured, recalled in the mind and boxed away, it's as if they have never been - until a moment when the pieces of the jigsaw re-form suddenly, sometimes pleasurably but more often painfully. Women look back at their young selves, at first marriages made when they were naive and trusting, at husbands and their difficult, demanding little ways. There is in this new collection an underlying heartbreak, a sense of regret in her characters for what might have been, for a fork in the road not taken, a memory suppressed in an act of prudent emotional housekeeping. But at the same time there is hope, there are second chances - here are people who reinvent themselves, seize life by the throat, who have moved on and can dare to conjure up the hidden memories, daring to go beyond what is remembered.