Alice Munro is one of the great short fiction writers out there today, a well-known fact, as far as I know. This collection of stories is actually inspired by and concerns Munro's family, her ancestors that immigrated to Canada from Scotland and her grandparents and parents. The stories she spins here are as startling and engrossing as any of her work, but are tinged with something extra--mortality, discussions of death or just the old icy grip of death hovering over past generations and concerning our author in her present life. In some ways, that entrances the reader more, and in other ways, the constant of an end to things leave her remembrances of early childhood as half-fulfilled, half-full of the promise she is also trying to put into them.

That being said, Munro's ability to pull the story of her family across the Canadian wilds is haunting and impressive, and tells us a lot about our fascination with the journeys those before us make.