These dazzling and utterly satisfying stories explore varieties and degrees of love - filial, platonic, sexual, parental and imagined - in the lives of apparently ordinary folk. In fact, Munro's characters pulse with idiosyncratic life. Under the polished surface of these unsentimental dispatches from the small-town and rural front lies a strong undertow of violence and sexuality, repressed until something snaps, with extraordinary force in some of the stories, sadly and strangely in others.