Check out our Most Anticipated Books for 2025

Book Summary and Reviews of Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage by Alice Munro

Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage by Alice Munro

Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage

Stories

by Alice Munro

  • Published:
  • Nov 2001, 323 pages
  • Rate this book

  • Buy This Book

About this book

Book Summary

A superb new collection from one of our best and best-loved writers. Nine stories draw us immediately into that special place known as Alice Munro territory–a place where an unexpected twist of events or a suddenly recaptured memory can illumine the arc of an entire life.

The fate of a strong-minded housekeeper with a "frizz of reddish hair," just entering the dangerous country of old-maidhood, is unintentionally (and deliciously) reversed by a teenaged girl's practical joke. A college student visiting her aunt for the first time and recognizing the family furniture stumbles on a long-hidden secret and its meaning in her own life. An inveterate philanderer finds the tables turned when he puts his wife into an old-age home. A young cancer patient stunned by good news discovers a perfect bridge to her suddenly regained future. A woman recollecting an afternoon's wild lovemaking with a stranger realizes how the memory of that encounter has both changed for her and sustained her through a lifetime.

Men and women are subtly revealed. Personal histories, both complex and simple, unfold in rich detail of circumstance and feeling. Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage provides the deep pleasures and rewards that Alice Munro's large and ever- growing audience has come to expect.

Membership Advantages
  • Reviews
  • "Beyond the Book" articles
  • Free books to read and review (US only)
  • Find books by time period, setting & theme
  • Read-alike suggestions by book and author
  • Book club discussions
  • and much more!
  • Just $45 for 12 months or $15 for 3 months.
  • More about membership!

Reviews

Media Reviews

"All of the stories share Munro's characteristic style, looping gracefully from the present to the past, interpolating vignettes that seem extraneous and bringing the strands together in a deceptively gentle windup whose impact takes the breath away. Munro has few peers in her understanding of the bargains women make with life and the measureless price they pay." —Publishers Weekly

"Munro's profound understanding of the power of memories and the stories we tell ourselves." —Booklist

"Surely Munro's best yet." —The New York Times Book Review

"She is the living writer most likely to be read in a hundred years." —Mona Simpson, The Atlantic Monthly

"One of the foremost practitioners of the art of the short story... . These tales have the intimacy of a family photo album and the organic feel of real life." —The New York Times

"A writer to cherish... . The sheer spaciousness of Munro's storytelling, her gift for surprising us with the truth about ourselves, has transcended national boundaries." —Los Angeles Times Book Review

"In Munro's hands, as in Chekhov's, a short story is more than big enough to hold the world–and to astonish us, again and again." —Chicago Tribune

This information about Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage was first featured in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.

Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.

Membership Advantages
  • Reviews
  • "Beyond the Book" articles
  • Free books to read and review (US only)
  • Find books by time period, setting & theme
  • Read-alike suggestions by book and author
  • Book club discussions
  • and much more!
  • Just $45 for 12 months or $15 for 3 months.
  • More about membership!

Author Information

Alice Munro Author Biography

Alice Munro was born in 1931 in Wingham, a small town in southwestern Ontario, to a family of small farmers. She began writing stories at the age of 12. She won a two-year scholarship to the University of Western Ontario. While at school she published several short stories in the student literary magazine. She left before graduating due to money troubles, and in order to marry another student, James Munro. The Munros raised three daughters and for several years ran a bookshop in Victoria; they eventually divorced and Alice Munro married Gerald Fremlin, a geographer. The Fremlins divide their time between Clinton, Ontario--not far from Munro's hometown of Wingham--and Comox, British Columbia.

She says that the turning point for her writing came in 1959 when she wrote "The Peace of ...

... Full Biography
Author Interview

Other books by Alice Munro at BookBrowse
  • Too Much Happiness jacket
  • The View from Castle Rock jacket
  • Runaway jacket

6 more...

Membership Advantages
  • Reviews
  • "Beyond the Book" articles
  • Free books to read and review (US only)
  • Find books by time period, setting & theme
  • Read-alike suggestions by book and author
  • Book club discussions
  • and much more!
  • Just $45 for 12 months or $15 for 3 months.
  • More about membership!

More Recommendations

Readers Also Browsed . . .

more short stories...

Membership Advantages
  • Reviews
  • "Beyond the Book" articles
  • Free books to read and review (US only)
  • Find books by time period, setting & theme
  • Read-alike suggestions by book and author
  • Book club discussions
  • and much more!
  • Just $45 for 12 months or $15 for 3 months.
  • More about membership!

Top Picks

  • Book Jacket: The Book of George
    The Book of George
    by Kate Greathead
    The premise of The Book of George, the witty, highly entertaining new novel from Kate Greathead, is ...
  • Book Jacket: The Sequel
    The Sequel
    by Jean Hanff Korelitz
    In Jean Hanff Korelitz's The Sequel, Anna Williams-Bonner, the wife of recently deceased author ...
  • Book Jacket: My Good Bright Wolf
    My Good Bright Wolf
    by Sarah Moss
    Sarah Moss has been afflicted with the eating disorder anorexia nervosa since her pre-teen years but...
  • Book Jacket
    Canoes
    by Maylis De Kerangal
    The short stories in Maylis de Kerangal's new collection, Canoes, translated from the French by ...

Members Recommend

  • Book Jacket

    Pony Confidential
    by Christina Lynch

    In this whimsical mystery, a grumpy pony must clear his beloved human's name from a murder accusation.

Who Said...

Beliefs are what divide people. Doubt unites them

Click Here to find out who said this, as well as discovering other famous literary quotes!

Wordplay

Solve this clue:

X M T S

and be entered to win..

Your guide toexceptional          books

BookBrowse seeks out and recommends the best in contemporary fiction and nonfiction—books that not only engage and entertain but also deepen our understanding of ourselves and the world around us.