Friend of My Youth

A “wickedly funny” (Newsweek) collection of ten short stories from Nobel Prize–winning author Alice Munro, “one of the most eloquent and gifted writers of contemporary fiction” (Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times).

“Each of her collections demonstrates such linguistic skill, delicacy of vision, and . . . moral strength and clarity.”—Chicago Tribune
 
A woman haunted by dreams of her dead mother. An adulterous couple stepping over the line where the initial excitement ends and the pain begins. A widow visiting a Scottish village in search of her husband’s past—and instead discovering unsetting truths about a total stranger.
 
The miraculously accomplished stories in this collection not only astonish and delight, but also convey the unspoken mysteries at the heart of all human experience. The mastery—the almost numinous ability to say the unsayable—makes Friend of My Youth a genuine literary event.Praise for Alice Munro

“Her work felt revolutionary when I came to it, and it still does.”—Jhumpa Lahiri

“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.”—Jonthan Franzen

“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 OatesAlice 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.