The Progress of Love

L.J. Rouse was a freelance writer in Toronto.

Love is never static: Alice Munro charts The Progress of Love through those special, precise, though often unmarked moments that prove to be milestones, places at which a life or lives are changed in directions from which there can be no turning back.

These are not necessarily “love” stories in the ordinary sense. The love with which they are concerned may be that of brothers and sisters, parents and children, friends, and, sometimes, strangers. Munro illuminates the hidden depths of relationships with a clarity and richness, a deceptive simplicity of language and power available to few writers. These eleven stories are among the best work of one of the finest short story writers in Canada, or for that matter, anywhere in the world. Alice Munro is the winner of the Governor General’s Award for Fiction, 1986.