Rediscover Alice Munro’s Canadian Classic Lives of Girls and Women

Celebrated Canadian author Alice Munro’s second book Lives of Girls and Women is this June’s book club selection for the Amnesty International Book Club. Published in 1971, the book is the intensely readable, touching, and very funny story of Del Jordan, a young woman who journeys from the carelessness of childhood through an uneasy adolescence in search of love and sexual experience.

The book is a collection of short stories chronicling Del’s life, leading some critics to characterize it as a novel. Set in and around the small Canadian town of Jubilee, Lives of Girls and Women is a coming-of-age story. As Del dreams of becoming famous, suffers embarrassment about her mother, endures the humiliation of her body’s insistent desires and tries desperately to fall in love, she grapples with the crises that mark the passage to womanhood. As the title suggests, Lives of Girls and Women features mainly female characters and explores feminist ideas and themes.

Alice Munro is one of the nation’s most popular authors, and is the recipient of many accolades, including the Nobel Prize for Literature, the Man Booker International Prize and the Writer’s Trust of Canada’s Marian Engel Award. Munro has also won Canada’s Governor General’s Award for fiction three times.

Find a free discussion guide and other book recommendations at amnestybookclub.ca.

Source: www.newscanada.com