The Beggar Maid: Stories of Flo and Rose

"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

Praise from fellow writers:

"Her work felt revolutionary when I came to it, and it still does." --Jhumpa Lahiri

"She is one of the handful of writers, some living, most dead, whom I have in mind when I say that fiction is my religion." --Jonthan Franzen

"The authority she brings to the page is just lovely." --Elizabeth Strout

"She's the most savage writer I've ever read, also the most tender, the most honest, the most perceptive." --Jeffery Eugenides

"Alice Munro can move characters through time in a way that no other writer can."--Julian Barnes

"She is a short-story writer who...reimagined what a story can do." --Loorie Moore

"There's probably no one alive who's better at the craft of the short story." --Jim Shepard

"A true master of the form." --Salman Rushdie

"A wonderful writer." --Joyce Carol Oates