Alice Munro's peerless ability to give us the essence of a life in often brief but always spacious and timeless stories is once again everywhere apparent in this brilliant new collection. In story after story, she illumines the moment a life is forever altered by a chance encounter or an action not taken, or by a simple twist of fate that turns a person out of his or her accustomed path and into a new way of being or thinking. While most of these stories take place in Munro's home territory -- the small Canadian towns around Lake Huron -- the characters sometimes venture to the cities, and the audiobook ends with four pieces set in the area where she grew up, and in the time of her own childhood : stories "autobiographical in feeling, though not, sometimes, entirely so in fact." These tales about departures and beginnings, accidents and dangers, and outgoings and homecomings both imagined and real, paint a radiant, indelible portrait of how strange, perilous, and extraordinary ordinary life can be.--Container