Open Secrets

Open Secrets, Alice Munro's eighth book, consists of eight matchless stories, each one as rich as a full novel. All of them provide compulsive reading -- and rewarding re-reading."Perhaps you will be surprised to hear from a person you don't know and that doesn't remember your name." These intriguing words begin a letter dated 1917 to the Librarian in Carstairs, Ontario (the heart of "Alice Munro Country"). The letter sweeps us away into a world of secrets and revelations where nothing -- not even a courtship by letter that leads, over time, to a solid marriage -- is as it originally seems.The Ontario stories range from "A Wilderness Station," which gives an account of an 1852 tree-felling accident and sheds light on the harsh life of the pioneers, all the way to the present, where family names known to us appear again in a world of TV shows and snowmobiles.Just as the stories range back and forth in time, they also travel far to distant...