Away from Her

Alice Munro has long been heralded for her penetrating, lyrical prose, and in "The Bear Came Over the Mountain" the basis for Sarah Polley's filmAway From Her her prodigious talents are once again on display. As she follows Grant, a retired professor whose wife Fiona begins gradually to lose her memory and drift away from him, we slowly see how a lifetime of intimate details can create a marriage, and how mysterious the bonds of love really are.

Alice Munro grew up in Wingham, Ontario, and attended the University of Western Ontario. She has published eleven previous collections of stories-Dance of the Happy Shades; Something I've Been Meaning to Tell You; The Beggar Maid; The Moons of Jupiter; The Progress of Love; Friend of My Youth; Open Secrets; The Love of a Good Woman; Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage; Runaway; and The View from Castle Rock--as well as a novel, Lives of Girls and Women, and a Selected Stories.

During her distinguished career she has been the recipient of many awards and prizes, including three Governor General's Literary Awards--Canada's highest; the Lannan Literary Award; the W.H. Smith Award, given to Open Secrets as the best book published in the United Kingdom in 1995; and the United States' NBCC Award. Her stories have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, The Paris Review, and other publications, and her collections have been translated into thirteen languages. Alice Munro and her husband divide their time between Clinton, Ontario, near Lake Huron, and Comox, British Columbia.