She writes with a beautiful clarity, an elemental humanity and a marvellous, limpid, funny, apprehension of what goes on

Some of the most honest, intuitive and exacting fiction, long or short, of our time

Munro's bold, unflinching narratives have taken the short story places many a novelist has feared to tread... That she does this in a style both calm and deliberate, fluid yet tightly controlled, stark yet compassionate, is what makes her insights into the human condition so profound

Written with veteran assurance, brimming with intensely believable characters and rich social detail, these dispatches from the most unsparing reaches of Munro's imagination confirm her acclaimed place on the highest ground of contemporary fiction

Alice Munro commands enormous respect and almost uncritical adoration from her readers

Too Much Happiness is her 11th collection, and as brilliant and surprising as any ... who could be better?

She has the lightest of touches, with every word seeming entirely necessary, but nothing set in stone....remarkable collection

Munro is famously hard to write about, in part because she's the opposite of the Borges character who joked about belonging not to art but to the history of art. Far from hanging on to the gates of literature, her stories create a powerful illusion of bringing their readers up against unmediated life; and life isn't penetrable by the normal procedures of book reviewing. Is Too Much Happiness as substantial a collection as Runaway (2004) or Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage (2001)? The only sensible answer is to recommend buying all three

As strong and vivid as ever... a gift for the humane observation and the specific, plausible detail

Assured collection from the short-story queen

What's striking about these early stories is that the thicker Welsh was steeped in the primordial goo of his Edinburgh Scots phonetics, the better the storytelling got

As you would expect, the stories in this collection involve a certain amount of cultural tourism to the lower depths, undertaken with black humour... Welsh's relish for degradation covers up a strong sentimental streak

Welsh's transcription of Scots dialect is brilliant... Welsh also has a fabulous sense of the absurd... The overall vibe of these stories is dark and grim. And fierily, fiercely funny