Alice Munro is a fellow Canadian author, who often writes about people who live in small, rural Canadian towns. The lives of the characters she writes about, however, are any thing but simple. Her collections of short stories are legendary. One of her more recent collections is Dance of the Happy Shades and Other Stories (1998). There are fifteen stories included, each of them depicting ordinary moments in life, but they are looked at through the eyes of someone who can decipher the underlying meaning.

Carol Shields, an American who has adopted Canada as her home, wrote the Pulitzer Prize—winning The Stone Diaries (1993), her most famous work. Shields creates a fictional character and then writes the book as if it were her protagonist's autobiography. The story follows the life of Daisy Goodwill as she tries to make sense of...