My trivial thinking

The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry , published in 2012 and long-listed for the Man Booker Prize that same year, is the debut novel of Rachel Joyce, who had spent twenty years writing plays for BBC Radio 4. Harold Fry, sixty‑five, is a retired brewery salesman living on his pension with his wife, Maureen. His childhood was unhappy, and his naturally introverted character has kept him at a distance from other people. His marriage to Maureen has long since grown cold. One morning, Harold receives a letter from Queenie Hennessy, a former colleague he has not seen in twenty years. She writes to tell him that she is dying of cancer in a hospice in Berwick‑upon‑Tweed. Harold writes a reply, but immediately feels that a letter cannot possibly express what he wants to say. He leaves the house intending to post it, but hesitates—and keeps walking to the next postbox, and then the next. At a petrol station, he stops for something to eat and tells a young waitress about Queenie. She mentions h...

  Too Much Happiness is a collection of ten short stories published in 2009 by Alice Munro, the Canadian writer who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2013. I hadn’t known her name before she received the prize, but when I later found her books at a local library, I felt compelled to read her work. I’ve read Raymond Carver before, but I’m not sure I truly enjoy short stories. They often provide only minimal description and convey so much with so few words that they can feel more difficult than novels. Still, several stories in this collection offer deep reflections on life over long stretches of time.   Dimensions Doree, a chambermaid, has endured a devastating tragedy: her three young children were murdered by her mentally unstable husband. She occasionally takes the bus to visit him in prison. One day, while she is on her way there, an unexpected accident occurs…   Fiction Jon and Joyce, both highly intelligent, drop out of college and start new lives. Jon learns wo...