In this vibrant series of interweaving stories, Alice Munro recreates the evolving bond—one that is both constricting and empowering—between two women in the course of almost forty years.

One is Flo, practical, suspicious of other people’s airs, at times dismayingly vulgar. The other is Rose, Flo’s stepdaughter, a clumsy, shy girl who somehow—in spite of Flo’s ridicule and ghastly warnings—leaves the small town she grew up in to achieve her own equivocal success in the larger world.