Perhaps it comes down to a case of the girl who cried wolf? In 2006 Munro said she was quitting writing ‘in the interests of having a manageable life’, only to publish two new collections, Too Much Happiness (2009) and now Dear Life. But it is tempting to attribute this neglect to other factors: the short story’s marginal status in the field of literature; Munro’s conscious decision to keep her distance from publishing centres and creative writing departments; the circumscription of her fiction to provincial life in south-western Ontario; a perception that she writes exclusively about and for women.

On the last two points, people have been wrong. In Dear Life there are stories set in Vancouver and Toronto; in ‘To Reach Japan’, we travel the full 4500 kilometres between them. Do we complain that Roth spent half a century hanging around Newark, New Jersey? As for men, nearly half of the stories in this collection have a male narrator, or take up a man’s side of things, and it turns out that stories of this kind have been there from the very beginning of Munro’s career – see ‘Thanks for the Ride’ in her first collection, Dance of the Happy Shades (1968). Her treatment of these men is in no essential way different from the attitude she adopts with her women protagonists: they have their complexities, which the stories aim to respect and not resolve; they try to do the right thing most of the time and have their reasons when they don’t; they are, in short, feeling, wanting, longing, flawed human beings.

Arguably, Dear Life’s most sympathetic character is a man: Ray Elliot, the night policeman, in ‘Leaving Maverley’. We hear how his experiences in the air force during World War II made him want ‘to do something meaningful with a life that had so inexplicably been left to him’; we observe his kindliness to a teenage girl with a repressive Christian father in the town he lives and works in; we watch him devote himself to his vivid but sickly wife for close to a decade. When the story ends and we are wrenched from him while he is in the grip of a loss ‘something like a lack of air, of proper behaviour in his lungs, a difficulty he supposed would go on forever’, our hearts, well, crumple. Munro’s genius is that she can compel us to care so much within the space of thirty pages; then, in the next story, she does it all over again.

But this suggests that Munro is a sentimentalist, which is also not true, so let’s turn to her technique, and how bold she can be with time. As a general rule, short stories tend to keep time by the clock rather than by the calendar, and this tendency has been intensified of late due to a partiality for the present tense in the contemporary story; one action follows directly from another, and because we’re there in lock step with the seconds ticking, we can’t stray much into the past or the future. Munro can write these kinds of stories, too – see ‘In Sight of the Lake’ in this collection, though there is bit of a twist – but she prefers the kind of temporal leaps novelists like Tolstoy were good enough and brave enough to make.

‘Pride’, for example, begins with its unnamed male narrator telling us about his schooldays in the 1930s ‘before the days of walking and exercising became fashionable’, and ends with a passing reference to email. But it is not just that the timelines of Munro’s stories have grown longer as she has grown older; it is the way they dart forwards and backwards to catch the events they want to detail, or race through the years, or loiter on a moment at will. In ‘To Reach Japan’, for instance, the story seems to be unfolding chronologically over the four-plus days it takes Greta and her daughter Katy to travel from British Columbia to Lake Ontario, but then you become conscious of the way moments of retrospection and flash-forwards push up into this timeline like grass through the cracks in the pavement. This is not even to mention the story’s narrative voice, which has a world-historical sense of time and its passing, and is not content to show only and never tell. In other stories she uses movie-like postscripts or jumps over decades in a single bound. Munro handles time like a cowboy trick-ropes his lasso.

It is true to say, however, that the majority of the stories in Dear Life are rooted in the period just prior to or after World War II. This could be because the book also contains four pieces that Munro describes as ‘autobiographical in feeling, though not, sometimes, entirely so in fact’ and that derive from that time. Munro claims that these reminiscences are ‘the first and last – and the closest – things’ she has ever had to say about her own life. (This is not quite true, as readers of her previous collection, The View from Castle Rock [2006] will know.) The Dear Life pieces recover some memory from childhood, and tend to marshal themselves around one of either of Munro’s parents. They tease out the tangles and knots of the past before our eyes: Munro as memoirist ponders, surmises, hypothesises, asks questions, and leaves them hanging if she has no answer; this isn’t memoir by diary entries. Their theme – perhaps even the theme of the collection as a whole – can be summed up by the phrase ‘traitorous feelings’. ‘The Eye’ and ‘Voices’, for example, record specific instances of Munro’s growing awareness of having a consciousness that does not converge with her mother’s; they beg to differ on the hired girl, Sadie, and on a woman in a taffeta dress at a town dance. But it is ‘Night’ that really stands out. In this story, Munro recalls when, as a teenager, the thought that she might strangle her younger sister sleeping in the bunk below hers – ‘Why not try the worst?’ – began to overtake her. Her father’s non-alarmist, human response to her eventual confession is celebrated seventy years on; indeed, it might be a key to understanding Munro’s approach to storytelling generally: ‘The fact is, what he did worked as well. It set me down, but without either mockery or alarm, in the world we were living in. People have thoughts they’d sooner not have. It happens in life.’ When Roth and Munro were asked to explain their retirements, they both cited a fear of failing powers: ‘it’s rare for outstanding work to be produced in an author’s later years,’ said Munro, ‘so one or two books fewer won’t really be anybody’s loss.’ In the case of Munro, however, there has been only increasing command, no diminishment.