Alice Munro

These stories set in Canada and linked by the town of Carstairs and Doud's piano factory were skilfully written and gave a picture of the development of a one-time frontier town, bringing it up to the late twentieth century. I took a while to become interested in the characters, but was reading them while rather busy with other matters and perhaps did not quite do them justice. Having said that, I still feel that they lacked sufficient interest for me as stand alone stories as that is what I thought them to be. Was I mistaken? The last one had more edge and was rather disturbing, quite unlike the others, bringing out the dark sides of the characters. Why did she decide to end like this? Was it a comment on modern society? I am not sure as each era had its problems. A book of quality but not really to my taste.