Lives of Girls and Women : A Novel

Lives Of Girls and Women is the intensely readable, touching, and very funny story of Del Jordan, a young woman who journeys from the carelessness of childhood through uneasy adolescence in search of love and sexual experience. The only novel from Alice Munro 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. As Del dreams of becoming famous, suffers embarrassment about her mother, endures the humiliation of her body's insistent desires, and tries desperately to fall in love, she grapples with the crises that mark the passage to womanhood. In her distinctive literary style, Munro presents a thought-provoking cycle of two women coping with the claustrophobic habits and norms of small-town life competing with their greater ambitions and desires to leave. "Alice Munro once observed: “The complexity of things — the things within things — just seems to be endless. I mean nothing is easy, nothing is simple”... That is also a perfect description of Ms Munro’s quietly radiant short stories - stories that have established her as one of the foremost practitioners of the form... Fluent and deceptively artless on the page, these stories are actually amazingly intricate constructions that move back and forth in time, back and forth between reality and memory, opening out, magically, to disclose the long panoramic vistas in these people’s lives... and the homely details of their day-to-day routines." - Michiko Kakutani, The New York TimesAlice Munro is a Canadian short-story writer who is widely considered one of the world's premier fiction writers. Munro is a three-time winner of Canada's Governor General's Award for fiction. Her stories focus on human relationships looked at through the lens of daily life. She has thus been referred to as "the Canadian Chekhov." She is the winner of the 2013 Nobel Prize in Lit The debut novel from Nobel Prize–winning author Alice Munro, “one of the most eloquent and gifted writers of contemporary fiction” (The New York Times). “Munro has an unerring talent for uncovering the extraordinary in the ordinary.”—Newsweek Rural Ontario, 1940s. Del 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. 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. Through these unwitting mentors and in her own encounters with sex, birth, and death, Del explores the dark and bright sides of womanhood. All along she remains a wise, witty observer and recorder of truths in small-town life. The result is a powerful, moving, and humorous demonstration of Alice Munro's unparalleled awareness of the lives of girls and women. 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. Del 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. 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. Through these unwitting mentors and in her own encounters with sex, birth, and death, Del explores the dark and bright sides of womanhood. All along she remains a wise, witty observer and recorder of truths in small-town life. The result is a powerful, moving, and humorous demonstration of Alice Munro's unparalleled awareness of the lives of girls and women. The book is a collection of several short stories, describing the struggles of growing up, which Del, the protagonist is confronted with. The book is a description of the initiation she is undergoing through out the process of turning from a girl to a woman. A portrayal of a young girl's youth in a Canadian town and her awakening to womanhood in the 1940s follows Del Jordan as she explores the dark and bright sides of womanhood and records the frustrations, joys, triumphs, and trials of small-town life