Adele recommends:
The View from Castle Rock by Alice Munro
This book came to me in a wonderful sequence of synchronicity and serendipity. Five participants of a book group I attend picked 2 titles each that they would like to read during the next 12 months. We have very eclectic tastes and there are no bounds on what can be selected. The titles were then randomly allocated into a sequenced reading list. This book, one of my recommendations, fell to be read directly after James Hogg’s The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner. Amazingly, in The View from Castle Rock, Hogg, ‘The Ettrick Shepherd’ is revealed as one of Alice Munro’s direct ancestors.
Munro’s series of tales is full of such happenstances and fateful events. It tracks the migration of her foremothers and fathers from Illinois to Canada and these are stories rich in detail as Munro has a remarkable cache of writings that she has been able to mine. But this is not merely a series of real, stirring and sometimes harrowing accounts of pioneers. Munro has chosen to write short stories throughout that draw on this history but embellish the real with what could have been.
I found this book astonishing and poignant and one that will resonate with all those of us with migrant ancestors.
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