A brilliant new collection of stories from one of the most acclaimed and beloved writers of our time. Alice Munro’s peerless ability to give us the essence of a life in often brief but always spacious and timeless stories is once again everywhere apparent in this brilliant new collection. In story after story, she illumines the moment a life is forever altered by a chance encounter or an action not taken, or by a simple twist of fate that turns a person out of his or her accustomed path and into a new way of being or thinking. A poet, finding herself in alien territory at her first literary party, is rescued by a seasoned newspaper columnist, and is soon hurtling across the continent, young child in tow, toward a hoped-for but completely unplanned meeting. A young soldier, returning to his fiancée from the Second World War, steps off the train before his stop and onto the farm of another woman, beginning a life on the move. A wealthy young woman having an affair with the married lawyer hired by her father to handle his estate comes up with a surprising way to deal with the blackmailer who finds them out. While most of these stories take place in Munro’s home territory—the small Canadian towns around Lake Huron—the characters sometimes venture to the cities, and the book ends with four pieces set in the area where she grew up, and in the time of her own childhood: stories “autobiographical in feeling, though not, sometimes, entirely so in fact.” A girl who can’t sleep imagines night after wakeful night that she kills her beloved younger sister. A mother snatches up her child and runs for dear life when a crazy woman comes into her yard. Suffused with Munro’s clarity of vision and her unparalleled gift for storytelling, these tales about departures and beginnings, accidents and dangers, and outgoings and homecomings both imagined and real, paint a radiant, indelible portrait of how strange, perilous, and extraordinary ordinary life can be.

艾丽丝·门罗首部荣耀国际文坛的代表作 【秘密，就是我们想逃离的回忆】 8个闪着生命之光、语言之美的惊人短篇（含村上春树翻译成日文版的《蓝花楹旅馆》） “她是当代短篇小说大师。”诺贝尔文学奖颁奖词 ★艾丽丝•门罗以她的短篇创作最为著名，但是她在每一个短篇小说中呈现的深度、智慧和精准比得上很多长篇小说家穷极一生的书写。每读门罗，便知生命中未曾想到之事。——布克国际奖评委会 ★这是少有的一年，没人抱怨诺贝尔委员会的选择。门罗是当我说“小说是我的信仰”时，我脑海里浮现出的少有的作家之一。——乔纳森•弗兰岑 ★艾丽丝•门罗是“作家中的作家”，读她的作品会感到愉悦。对我们这些热爱短篇小说的人来说，阅读这些现实主义、契诃夫般的杰作让人深感荣幸。——乔伊斯•卡罗尔•欧茨 ★她是我们这个时代最伟大的短篇小说作家。——A.S.拜厄特 ★她的小说有种独一无二的现实感。——村上春树 ★她将为全世界的读者提供一份完全不同的书单。——苏童 ★门罗的女性写作方式是非个人性的。她会描写她熟悉的生活，但这些作品中的人物远远是在国界以外的。——陆建德 ★我爱她的真实和沉重，沉重中的那种真挚的温柔。她的小说很重，一本书要慢慢看完。——陈丹燕 在这八篇关于“秘密”的故事里，艾丽丝•门罗唤起了旧爱突然重生的毁灭性力量。忘情于书信欢爱的图书管理员、流连在荒野的孤女、破坏邻居家宅的女基督徒……门罗笔下的女子都有一个“秘密”，她们保持着与真相的模糊距离。《公开的秘密》曾获加拿大总督奖提名，被《纽约时报》评为年度好书，并为门罗斩获了首个国外文学奖项——WH．史密斯文学奖，自此，门罗作品日益受到国际文坛广泛关注。