Taken from the collection entitled Open Secrets, this short-story is very much concerned with what is and is not revealed and the secrets and secret lives we keep and lead beneath the lived, visible surface. You could look up from your life of the moment and feel the world crackling beyond the walls.’ p. A pioneer woman homesteading in the Canadian wilderness with her new husband and his brother devises a clever stratagem for eluding the certain and dire fate that awaits her if she remains on the farm.‘Now she felt what everybody else did – a constant fear and misgiving and at the same time this addictive excitement. Two childhood friends resolve their lives in a madcap and unexpected way on a memorable midsummer's eve. A romantic tale of capture and escape in the wilds of central Europe may or may not be true, but it comforts the hearer who, on an adventure of her own, is fleeing her hushand. A long-hidden secret sticks in the consciousness of a young woman, who, in an outrageous but entirely satisfying act, finally rids herself of its thrall. A heart patient on a trip to her doctor on a hot summer's day has a revelation about the lasting power of an old love. Their power accumulates layer by layer as time and reality shift, identities become uncertain, truths surface. They are about lovers found and lovers lost but lodged still in the subconscious, about secrets that change lives, about people whose histories are opening out or coming to an end.

These are stories in which women are central. ' Open Secrets is a book that dazzles with its faith in language and in life. And Munro shows us how one woman's romantic tale of capture and escape in the high Balkans may end up inspiring another woman who is fleeing a husband and lover in present-day Canada. She tells of vanished schoolgirls and indentured frontier brides and an eccentric recluse who, in the course of one surpassingly odd dinner party, inadvertently lands herself a wealthy suitor from exotic Australia.

In these eight tales, Munro evokes the devastating power of old love suddenly recollected.

Open secrets alice munro analysis