There is no doubt that Alice Munro is a great writer; her many awards and accolades and her win this year of the Man Booker International Prize for lifetime achievement attest to that. Her short stories, which have the depth and clarity of novels, usually feature women living in regional areas of Canada, dealing with ordinary relationships and the vicissitudes of ordinary life.

Her new collection is somewhat of a departure, not in style, but in content. They mostly have a bizarre, perhaps sinister, twist –after beguiling the reader with their beauty. In ‘Fiction’, a controlling husband brutally kills his three young children to teach his wife a lesson; the wife continues to visit him in prison and is macabrely drawn to him. A woman lives alone, dying from cancer, and answers the door to a stranger who demands food and money and confesses to the murder of his wife and parents-in-law. The title story, ‘Too Much Happiness’, is based on the life of a nineteenth-century mathematician and novelist – it is a shining gem in its own right. This book is a rare treasure.