Too Much Happiness

By Alice Munro Random House, 305 pages, $53.99.

Canadian writer Alice Munro, often called America's Chekhov, is notable internationally for her short stories.

She has been awarded all the major Canadian literary prizes, and some, like the Governor General's Award for Fiction, several times. This year Munro received the Man Booker International Prize for her overall contribution to fiction on the world stage.

Munro is sometimes lauded as the writer's writer, the role model to whom the very best aspire. Margaret Atwood says Munro is "among the major writers of English fiction of our time". Our own Owen Marshall ranks her up there at the top, with Irish writer William Trevor.

In 2007, Munro's memoir The View from Castle Rock was referred to as her last book. Now, at the age of 77, she has published a 12th collection of short stories, and there is not a glimmer of her nearing the end of her game. Too Much Happiness brings us the short story at its very best.

These stories are relatively long. Where some short-fiction writers deal with the nuances in a single episode, Munro takes on the expanse of whole lives, weaving in the tenure of relationships, their back-stories and consequences.

In Deep-Holes she takes an accident at a family picnic – a child falls into a cave and breaks both his legs – and explores its impact on the rest of their lives.

There is not "too much happiness" here. Munro's stories crawl with dark undercurrents, festering injustices, and cruelty.

An appalling crime is pivotal in the telling of the opening story, Dimensions. What appears at first to be the study of the manipulative marriage of Doree and Lloyd takes on a new dimension when he murders their children.

Munro is too good for cliche. The story's depth is built on compassion, and like most of these stories it resonates with the fortitude of women.

Munro is brilliant at exposing human complexities, with the unsettling and the ordinary often juxtaposed with such a sense of calmness as to become familiar.

Little bizarre twists are made credible by how she invests just the right detail, and the sudden, subtle revelation.

In Free Radicals Nita has terminal cancer and is living alone following the death of her husband, when a stranger enters her house with a gun. Liberated by the fact that she is dying, Nita confronts the intruder with an absurd confidence.

Wenlock Edge was my favourite. A young student reads Housman's poetry to an old man she has just met, naked. How she gets there is so magnificently set up, so clever and convincing as to shed light on the vulnerability and courage of women. Munro makes the perverse fascinating, and plausible.

These 10 stories are truly superb, but don't read them all at once. They are too good, too rich to be loaded one on top of another.

• Jessica Le Bas is a writer, poet and teacher from Richmond.

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