Eight new stories about what people will do for love, and the unexpected routes their passion will force them to take. A prim, old landlady in Vancouver with a crime of passion lurking in her past. A young mother with a secret life who abandons her children to be with her lover. A country doctor in the 1960s discovered by his daughter to be helping desperate women, his "special patients."These and other fascinating characters weave their way through stories that track the changes that time brings to families, lovers and even to friends who share old, intimate secrets about the "prostration of love"in a collection that is clear-eyed about the clutter of our emotional lives. The rich layering that gives Alice Munro's work such a strong sense of life is particularly apparent in the title story, in which the death of a local opto-metrist brings an entire community into focus - from the preadolescent boys who find his body to the man who probably killed him, to the woman who must decide what to do about what she might know. Large, moving, profound - these are stories that extend the limits of fiction.