Open Secrets

Open Secrets is a short-story collection published in 1994 by the Canadian writer Alice Munro, winner of the 2013 Nobel Prize in Literature, and stands alongside Runaway and Dear Life as one of her signature works. The book consists of eight stories that are independent yet interlinked, mostly set in and around the small town of Carstairs in Huron County, Ontario, with characters reappearing across stories and echoing one another as their fates interweave and diverge like a net. Among them: a librarian who waits for her lover only to read of his marriage in the newspaper; an orphan girl who confesses to a murder charge to escape implication and instead finds shelter in prison; a female hermit who shocks a dinner party by marrying an Australian suitor; and a woman who flees the Balkans and in turn inspires another Canadian woman to flee her husband and lover. Munro breaks with linear time, interleaving memory and present, and in seemingly calm domestic narration touches layer by layer on women's repressed but never extinguished desires, unspoken traumas, and choices. The title itself states the theme: some secrets everyone knows, but no one says aloud. The story "The Jack Randa Hotel" was translated into Japanese by Haruki Murakami, who called it as solid "as a nail driven into a wall." The book was nominated for the Governor General's Award, won the W.H. Smith Literary Award, and was named a New York Times notable book of the year.