Munro is at the height of her powers...a testimony to a great talent

That Munro is a great writer of short stories should, by now, go without saying. She is also one of the two or three best writers of fiction (of any length) now alive. The title story of this collection is one of her masterpieces...a brilliant piece of story-telling, tautly-structured and exquisitely balanced

A new collection of Alice Munro stories is a literary event that more and more of us look forward to, we are very unlikely to find a richer or rarer treat all year...the eight new stories in The Love of a Good Woman show this miraculous and truly great writer at the height of her powers...a perfect story collection

Alice Munro's stories...reward each pleasurable effort, as the best fiction always does...a Munro story has the depth and intricacy of a long novel, more than any other living writer in English...she can account for 20 years of a person's life in a single, telling paragraph, or even in a subtly placed phrase...The Love of a Good Woman is a superb, but unsettling, collection

One of the finest short-story writers of our time...absorbing and brilliant

Superb...Long ago, Virginia Woolf described George Eliot as one of the few writers 'for grown-up people.' The same might today, and with equal justice, be said of Alice Munro

Alice Munro is indisputably a master. Like all great writers, she helps sharpen perception...Her imagination is fearless...A better book of stories can scarcely be imagined

A riveting collection...a lovely book. Munro's stories move through the years with a sneaky grace

A triumph...certain to seal her reputation as our contemporary Chekhov

Superlative...She distills a novel's worth of dramatic events into a story of 20 pages

These astonishing stories remind us, yet again, of the literary miracles Alice Munro continues to perform

Goosebumpingly unforgettable

Runaway may well be the synthesizing work of one of literature's keenest investigators into the human soul

The great Alice Munro proves again why short story writers bow down to her

[Munro] really is the short story writer to beat... Munro has always been fascinated by those moments that tilt our world on its axis, as though the world really does turn on a kiss, but her brilliance lies in the psychological way that she convinces us of that fact

In crystalline prose, she illuminates her characters' hopes and longings

[Munro] has been compared to Chekhov and I'm only being slightly tongue in cheek when I say that the honour is entirely his. Dear Life is comprised of 13 rich and startling stories, a must read

I haven’t even finished all of Dear Life, but Alice Munro’s stories have lived with me for such a long time and with such quiet passion that I’m barely capable of explaining why

[Munro’s] talent is formidable but she has never been self-seeking: her short stories have a subtle, covert brilliance

These stories won’t give you easy moral comfort, but will stretch you. They’re moral in that they name things as they are

Dear Life is a dazzling portrait of ordinary existence which illustrates how seemingly insignificant meetings and moments can have a monumental impact

This collection is beautiful; full of pure, simple truths that linger long in the mind