The world0s finest living short-story writer turns to her family for inspiration; and what follows is a fictionalised, brilliantly imagined version of the past. From her ancestors´ view from Edinburgh´s Castle Rock in the eighteenth century, to her parent´s thwarted ambitions in Ontario, and her own awakening in ´50s Canada, Munro effortlessly weaves fact and myth to create an epic story of past and present, proving that fiction has much to tell us about life.