16 Must-Read Books for November 2012

With her penetrating new collection, Dear Life, Alice Munro demonstrates once again why she deserves her reputation as a master of short fiction. Set mostly against the sprawling backdrop of rural Canada during and just after World War II, these 14 stories explore with exquisite intimacy the characters' pivotal moments. In "Amundsen," a young teacher working at a tuberculosis sanatorium gets swept up in a brief romance that defines the rest of her life. In "To Reach Japan," an aspiring poet turned housewife plots her escape through her own version of a message in a bottle: a cryptic letter sent to a man she has met only once. Nostalgia permeates the collection; events are often refracted through the lens of imperfect memory. (Phrases such as "I think I can remember" appear frequently.) The last four stories, Munro explains in an epigraph, are emotionally—if not entirely factually—autobiographical. Taken together, they form an evocative mini-memoir of Munro's hardscrabble childhood on a farm in Ontario. "This is not a story, only life," declares the protagonist of the title narrative. With the subtlety and complexity of Munro's writing, it's hard to tell the difference.