After 78 years of life, 14 collections of short stories, and prizes too numerous to list, it’s not surprising that Canadian writer Alice Munro should turn her attention towards old age and death. The characters that populate the 10 stories of her latest collection are mostly women—though a few are men—who are not yet incapacitated by old age, but who have many more years behind them than they have ahead. Thoughts of mortality have crept into much of Munro’s work over the years; in this case, however, death not only lurks in the dark spaces of her stories, but prowls the better-lit areas as well.