{"product_id":"the-view-from-castle-rock","title":"Alice Munro: The View From Castle Rock [2006] hardback","description":"'Alice Munro has a strong claim to being the best fiction writer now working in North America...She is speaking to you and to me right here, right now.' - Jonathan Franzen. 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.\u003cbr\u003eAnd 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.","brand":"Munro, Alice","offers":[{"title":"Very Good","offer_id":49126431818067,"sku":"XV80701179892","price":14.99,"currency_code":"EUR","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0616\/4001\/6057\/files\/munro-alice-the-view-from-castle-rock-xv80701179892-57940581581139.jpg?v=1726504321","url":"https:\/\/theirishbookshop.live\/products\/the-view-from-castle-rock","provider":"Chapters Bookstore","version":"1.0","type":"link"}