Too Much Happiness

She writes with a beautiful clarity, an elemental humanity and a marvellous, limpid, funny, apprehension of what goes on – Jane Shilling * Sunday Telegraph *
Some of the most honest, intuitive and exacting fiction, long or short, of our time – Tom Gatti * The 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 *
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 *
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 *
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 *
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 *

Alice Munro was born in 1931 and was the author of thirteen collections of stories and the novel, Lives of Girls and Women. She received many awards and prizes, including three of Canada’s Governor General’s Literary Awards and two Giller Prizes, the Rea Award for the Short Story, the Lannan Literary Award, the WHSmith Book Award in the UK, the National Book Critics Circle Award in the US, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize for Who Do You Think You Are? (previously published as The Beggar Maid), and was awarded the Man Booker International Prize 2009 for her overall contribution to fiction on the world stage, and in 2013 she won the Nobel Prize in Literature. Her stories have appeared in the New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly, Paris Review and other publications, and her collections have been translated into thirteen languages. Alice Munro died in 2024.

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