The Progress of Love

The Progress of Love is a short-story collection by Canadian writer Alice Munro, first published in 1986. The Chinese edition, translated by Yin Gao and published by Yilin Press in November 2013, contains 11 stories and runs to about 386 pages. The collection won Munro the Governor General's Award and stands as an important work from her mature period, before she gained wider international attention. Most of the stories are set in the Ontario countryside and small towns, and their characters are ordinary farmers, shop clerks, mothers and daughters, husbands and wives, siblings. The narratives often begin with a family anecdote told and retold over the years, then slowly crack open along the seams of time and memory, revealing what those involved could not see at the time. Love, kinship, duty, betrayal, and forgiveness are never simply named in Munro's hands: a visit, a telegram, an old joke can, years later, change a person's understanding of their own life. The title story, which opens the book, follows a daughter tracing her mother's despair and rescue in her youth; the stories that follow concern a boy living far from home, hesitation within a marriage, estrangement between sisters, a solitary person's self-imposed exile—together forming a continuous portrait of how love comes into being, changes shape, and fades. With restrained, finely detailed narration that moves freely through time, Munro reveals the intimate, hard-to-articulate corners of ordinary life, and lets readers see parts of themselves in close relationships that they too have never quite noticed.