Too much happiness? If anything, the characters in these ten stories by Alice Munro have too little. In ‘Dimensions’, the terrifying and powerful first story, Doree works as a chambermaid at an inn, scrubbing bathrooms, making beds, wiping mirrors, glad that her work gives her little time to think—because she cannot think about the things she has lost. ‘Deep-Holes’ begins with a man and a woman taking their children for a picnic. One of the boys falls into a hole in the rocks and is rescued just in time by his father. Years later, when the children have grown up and gone away, the woman reflects on the unknown depths to which they can fall, with no possibility of rescue.

Most of the stories are set in the rural Canadian landscape that appears so frequently in Munro’s stories. In ‘Wood’, about a man obsessed with cutting wood, the forest itself plays a central part in the narrative as the source of the deepest and the most mysterious longings. Skillfully detailed, taut with feeling, and bleakly compassionate in their truthfulness, the stories are about the conflicts of women’s lives. The desire for freedom but also, as a young girl watches three women struggle over a dying man, for control. The desire for a life of a mind or sometimes-as in the story about an elderly woman confronting an intruder—just for life itself.

The final story, which gives the collection its title, is a fictionalisation of the life of Sophia Kovalevsky, the 19th-century Russian novelist and mathematician. “They had given her the Bordin Prize, they had kissed her hand and presented her with speeches and flowers in the most elegant lavishly lit rooms. But they had closed their doors when it came to giving her a job. They would no more think of that than of employing a learned chimpanzee.” The narrative moves across Europe, from Russia to Stockholm, across the years as wars are waged, revolutions fail, everyone grows older, and Sophia’s brief and brilliant life comes to a tragic end.

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