Lives of Girls and Women

Winner of the Nobel Prize in 2013, Alice Munro's Lives of Girls and Women is an autobiographical novel set in rural Ontario during the 1940s. Del Jordan lives on her father's fox farm, where her closest friends are an eccentric bachelor family friend and her troubled younger brother. Once she starts spending more time in town, however, she's surrounded by women--her mother, who runs a boardinghouse for local farmers; her mother's boarder Fern Dogherty; and her best friend Naomi, with whom she shares all the anxieties and joys of adolescence. Through these unintentional mentors and her own encounters with sex, birth, and death, Del explores the dark and bright sides of womanhood.