Few authors can be easily recognised as being among the greatest of their generation. Fewer still can easily be counted as staying among the literary elite for the entirety of their careers – their writing reaching across multiple generations of readers over the course of their lives. It is therefore fair to say that Nobel-Prize winning author Alice Munro is truly one of a kind.

Described by Jonathan Franzen as having “a strong claim to being the best fiction writer in North America”, the now-retired Munro has consistently inspired devotion among her readers. For Margaret Atwood, she is “an international literary saint”, while the New Yorker magazine describes her as “our blessing”. When she received her Nobel Prize for Literature in 2013, the Swedish Academy called her “a master of the contemporary short story”. This, certainly, is beyond dispute. With 14 story collections, her psychologically subtle stories are nothing if not personal – and all the more intimate for it.