With the ease and mastery that have won extraordinary acclaim for her writing, Alice Munro explores the most intimate and transforming moments of experience -- moments when the shape of a life is set, moments of realization about the burden, the power, and the nature of love.Alice Munro's characters, vulnerable and inured to hardship, find themselves struggling in a brutal yet mysteriously beautiful world: a young man contends with the responsibility he feels for his brother, a divorced woman returns to her childhood home and the memory of her parents' own complicated yet enduring marriage, a man visits his ex-wife with his current lover, only to feel a closer kinship with his estranged partner and her perceptive ways. In these eleven stories Alice Munro proves once again a sensitive and compassionate chronicler of modern times. Drawing us into the potent and intimate corners of various lives, she tells us much about ourselves, our choices, and our experiences of love.