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Chapter Overview
Chapter 1: AudiobookHub Recommendation
Chapter 2: — A Letter That Was Never Meant to Be
Chapter 3: — A Housekeeper With No Soft Edges
Chapter 4: — The Prank Turns Into a Departure
Chapter 5: — Gdynia: No Welcome, No Comfort
Chapter 6: — The Midpoint Choice: Cut Losses or Build a Life
Chapter 7: — What the Town Thinks vs. What Happens
Chapter 8: — Other Lives, Same Quiet Violence
Chapter 9: — Bargains, Betrayals, and the Stories We Keep
Chapter 10: — What Love Becomes When Memory Fails
Description
Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage is a story collection in which ordinary Canadian lives are quietly upended by obsession, illness, betrayal, and the strange mercy of chance. Alice Munro follows women and men across decades—through childhood fixations, midlife shocks, and late-life reckonings—showing how a single act (a letter opened, a secret kept, a kiss taken, a mistake made) can redirect an entire future.
The title story begins with a cruel prank that accidentally manufactures a romance, while other stories move through cancer, disability, adultery, family myths, and the shifting meanings of dignity and desire. Munro’s hallmark is emotional precision: her characters rarely announce what they feel, but their choices—what they hide, what they say, what they cannot undo—reveal everything.
Who Should Listen
- Listeners who enjoy literary, character-driven fiction where the plot turns on intimate decisions and emotional consequences
- Fans of short stories about memory, marriage, aging, and the quiet shocks inside everyday life
- Readers who like nuanced, unsentimental portraits of love and power—especially when endings are both startling and plausible