The questions, discussion topics, and author biography that follow are intended to enhance your group's reading of Alice Munro's Open Secrets. Alice Munro is an acknowledged master of the short story, and her newest collection has garnered the very highest praise. Most of the eight stories inOpen Secrets take place in Munro's native Canada and particularly in the small Ontario town of Carstairs. Munro's exploration of her characters' varied lives reveals entire worlds of passion, joy, despair--even exoticism and adventure--beneath exteriors that are often deceptively mundane.

The central characters in the stories are all women: an emotionally adventurous librarian; a young woman kidnapped by Albanian tribesmen in the 1920s; a farmer's wife who yearns for gentility; a young born-again Christian whose unresolved feelings of love and anger cause her to vandalize a house; a spurned middle-aged woman who follows the man who rejected her to Australia and spies on him; a young frontier wife in the wilderness with her abusive husband. Munro explores female themes with great depth and power, but the range of her vision is not exclusively female: through the eyes of her fictional women she examines the culture and values of her world while weaving complex, luminous, and poetic apprehensions of the milieu she has made so intensely her own.