Dance of the Happy Shades

Dance of the Happy Shades (Toronto, 1968), Alice Munro's first book of stories, established her as one of Canada's most accomplished contemporary writers. Her preferred settings, always painstakingly realized, are recognizably southwestern Ontarian; her themes include the gaps in communication within families and the pressures exerted by memory and the past. Munro's powerful realism, her precision of style and her eye for revelatory detail place her stories among the finest being written in English today. Dance of the Happy Shades was translated into French as Danse des ombres (Montréal, 1979).