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The View from Castle Rock

by Alice Munro - £9.99  Vintage (2007)
paperback    ISBN 13: 9780099497998 | ISBN 10: 0099497999

On a clear day, you could see 'America' from Edinburgh's Castle Rock - or so said Alice Munro's great-great-great-grandfather, James Laidlaw, when he had drink taken. Then, in 1818, Laidlaw left the parish of 'no advantages', of banked Presbyterian emotions and uncanny tales - where, like his more famous cousin James Hogg, he was born and bred - and sailed to the new world with his family.
 
This is the story of those shepherds from the Ettrick Valley and their descendants, among them the author herself. They were a Spartan lot, who kept to themselves; showing off was frowned on, and fear was commonplace, at least for females...
 
But opportunities present themselves for two strong-minded women in a ship's close quarters; a father dies, and a baby vanishes en route from Illinois to Canada; another story hints at incest; childhood is short and hazardous. This is family history where imperfect recollections blur into fiction, where the past shows through the present like the tracks of a glacier on a geological map.
 
And woven into it are first-person stories that draw on material from Munro's own life... First love flowers under an apple tree while lust rears its head in a barn; a restless mother with ideas beyond her station declines painfully; a father farms fox fur and turkeys; a clever girl escapes to college and then into a hasty marriage.
 
Beneath the ordinary landscape there's a different story - evocative, frightening, sexy, unexpected, gripping. Alice Munro tells it like no other.

(Price & availability last checked: June 2018)

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In booklists: Writers by Surname - M, Fiction - Scottish Writers (and novels set in Scotland), Historical Fiction,
In categories: Fiction, Ireland, Scotland & Wales, History & Biography,