The Beggar Maid

Born into the back streets of a small Canadian town, Rose battled incessantly with her practical and shrewd step-mother, Flo, who cowed her with tales of her own past and warnings of the dangerous world outside. But Rose was ambitious - she won a scholarship and left for Toronto where she married Patrick. She was his Beggar Maid, 'meek and voluptuous, with her shy white feet', and he was her knight, content to sit and adore her...

ISBN 0099458357   DEWEY edition DC22 ISBN13 9780099458357 (What's this?)   Pages 224 Publisher Vintage   Weight (grammes) 159 Imprint Vintage   Published in London Format Paperback   Height (mm) 199 Publication date 06 May 2004   Width (mm) 129 Library of Congress PR9199.3.M   Spine width (mm) 18 DEWEY 813.54   Academic level General

" Whether Alice Munro's The Beggar Maid is a collection of stories or a new kind of novel I'm not quite sure, but whatever it is, it's wonderful. The psychological precision...is a delight, and the startling twists -- the unexpected leaps in time, the transformation of familiar characters -- they make the book what books ought to be, a little wild, a little mysterious." -- John Gardner In this exhilarating series of interweaving stories, Alice Munro re-creates the evolving bond -- one that is both constricting and empowering -- between two women in the coupe of almost forty years. One is Flo, practical, suspicious of other people's airs, at times dismayingly vulgar. The other is Rose, Flo's stepdaughter, a clumsy, shy girl who somehow-in spite of Flo's ridicule and ghastly warnings -- leaves the small town she grew up in to achieve her own equivocal success in the larger world. " The stories are absolutely wonderful-every word she writes is interesting." -- Alice Adams " The best stories of the year." -- "The Nation"

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