book review the jealousy man

Book Review | The Jealousy Man and Other Stories by Jo Nesbø

A collection of short stories from one of the masters of Nordic noir. Dark tales of vengeance, justice, and love gone wrong in societies where everyone would do anything to survive.

… ever since I have had nightmares that involve falling and drowning. Actually, on some night the dream seems like something warm and pleasant, a sleep in which everything painful ceases to exist. Who says you can’t dream of dying? ( The Jealousy Man )

The Jealousy Man and Other Stories is a collection divided into two parts: Jealousy and Power. I have not read all of the author’s previous work but I’m familiar with his successful series featuring the enigmatic investigator, Harry Hole. I expected the stories here to be in a similar vein but surprisingly only one features a detective character. The others are more focused on relationships and human nature. The storylines are complex and vicious, not shying away from the darkest sides of humanity. The characters are forced to make tough choices and face the consequences of those actions. Innocence people get caught up and pay the price. I really liked the dystopian and sci-fi elements in Part 2.

However, I found many of the stories repetitive because they are mostly about men being obsessed with women. Only two out of the eleven stories feature female protagonists. Some of the references are outdated; for example, the r-slur is used a few times. There’s a particularly horrific animal death. Even children are not spared in this collection and that can be hard to get through. But the stories are generally emotionally resonant and provide an insight into the characters’ motivation and decisions. There’s plenty of philosophical musings that can be a turnoff for some readers but for the most part, I did enjoy it.

Here are my favourite stories from the book – The Jealousy Man where a detective investigates a missing person case and stumbles into a complicated relationship between two brothers that reminds him of his past. The Line features a retail worker who has a solution for people cutting in line at her store. Rat Island is an apocalyptic nightmare where a man seeks justice in the aftermath of an attack and crosses paths with the woman responsible. In The Cicadas , a man and his best friend fall for the same woman, opening the door to a parallel dimension. In Black Knight, an assassin is targeted by an enemy who vows to destroy him in the most painful way possible.

The Jealousy Man is a complicated collection focusing on the question of morality and vengeance. If you’re looking for something dark that also makes you think, give this a try.

CW: rape, suicide, child abuse, animal death, mistreatment of a disabled person

About the author: Jo Nesbø

Translated by Robert Ferguson

Photo by Larm Rmah

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Submitting a book for review, write the editor, you are here:, the jealousy man and other stories.

Jo Nesbø is one of the most talented writers working today. His mostly Norwegian-based mysteries and thrillers are top-notch. He has proven his ability to succeed with the terrific Harry Hole series, as well as stand-alone novels like THE KINGDOM and HEADHUNTERS, which are modern-day classics. So I was more than a little intrigued to read his first collection of short stories, THE JEALOUSY MAN.

Each of these stories could be a primer in the seven deadly sins, as it seems Nesbø focuses on a different one in each tale. He divides the pieces into different subcategories, and you will understand why once you read them all.

In “London,” the standout first story in “Part One – Jealousy,” we have a mental showdown between two characters who are found aboard a plane together. A man and a woman are seated on the flight, not by accident, and I had to grin when one of them refers to the Patricia Highsmith classic, STRANGERS ON A TRAIN. One claims to be petrified of flying, while the other confesses to hoping the plane crashes because they want to die. Are we being victimized by an unreliable narrator, or is something entirely different going on? The dialogue is so razor-sharp that you simply will not have time to think too deeply about the characters. You just want to find out if they both make it to London alive.

"Each of these stories could be a primer in the seven deadly sins, as it seems Nesbø focuses on a different one in each tale. He divides the pieces into different subcategories, and you will understand why once you read them all."

The title story, “The Jealousy Man,” is an above-average novella. Here, Inspector Nikos Balli has flown to a small Greek isle called Kalymnos. There he meets up with a colleague, George Kostopoulos, where they discuss the case that Balli has been assigned --- the disappearance of Julian Schmid. The prime suspect, and probably the last person to see him alive, is his twin brother, Franz.

Franz insists that Julian left the room they were sharing at 6am to go for a swim and never returned. Balli sees his role in this case in remarkably simple terms. He is to make a diagnosis as to whether or not jealousy of a homicidal nature was involved. He will be the first to admit that long cases involving tactical and technical investigation is not his strong suit, so he will leave that to his colleagues back in Athens. He claims that he can recall the moment when people recognize that he is about to read other people’s jealousy.

Balli knows this because he has lived through the jealousy cycle: disbelief, despair, rage, self-contempt and, finally, depression. He discusses a particular situation in which a woman he loved put him through this and believes she made him what he has become in his professional life --- the self-proclaimed Jealousy Man. The case, in Balli’s mind, comes down to the twin brothers battling over a woman. He maintains that the rage of jealousy is like love; it’s a madness that can make people do things they normally would never dream of doing.

His involvement in the investigation is usually just a day or two, so his work as a divining rod for jealousy needs to happen quickly. When he does produce a resolution, which ultimately solves the case, it is done brilliantly.

“Rat Island,” which opens “Part Two – Power,” takes place during the start of a wild pandemic that has spread to the point where we find ourselves on the roof of a 90-story high-rise building awaiting a helicopter that is coming to take away Colin Lowe and his family. When the paranoia over the pandemic is just a whisper, wealthy individuals like Lowe purchase land on remote islands or far away in the woods where they can hunker down until the situation reaches an inevitable ending. The helicopter would be traveling to an aircraft carrier, The New Frontier. Unlike COVID-19, here it doesn’t take long from the discovery of the virus to the outbreak of the pandemic and the sudden dissolution of everything.

What makes “Rat Island” work so well is the depiction of the response by the richest of the rich. Not only are they able to get in front of this issue to see that they and their families are taken care of, they also are stocking their bunker-like location with enough weaponry and those trained to use them that they have nothing to worry about. They are headed to Rat Island, which (not surprisingly) is infamous for its abundant rat population. It is here where the symbolism of the rats and the wealthy survivors is constantly at play, which makes for a great breakdown of global emergencies and how they could play out.

At some point in the collection, Nesbø writes, “In fiction great narrative power is often vested in a single look. In a literary sense the convention helps the writer tell his story well, and sometimes to great effect.” I could not have encapsulated my thoughts about THE JEALOUSY MAN AND OTHER STORIES any better than this.

Reviewed by Ray Palen on October 15, 2021

The Jealousy Man and Other Stories written by Jo Nesbø , translated by Robert Ferguson

• Publication Date: September 27, 2022
• Genres: Fiction , Mystery , Short Stories , Suspense , Thriller
• Paperback: 624 pages
• Publisher: Vintage Crime / Black Lizard
• ISBN-10: 059331557X
• ISBN-13: 9780593315576

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THE JEALOUSY MAN

And other stories.

by Jo Nesbø ; translated by Robert Ferguson ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 26, 2021

Humanity is at low ebb in this enjoyable, if uneven, collection—Nesbø’s first.

On leave from his Harry Hole novels, Nesbø delivers stories ranging from dystopian visions to time-honored tales of duplicity and revenge.

Few of Nesbø's characters pass the decency test. A man's kindliness toward a sobbing woman seated next to him on a flight to London masks dark intentions. An assassin with a day job in Milan as a psychologist is himself marked for death by a sadistic hit man of greater repute. In San Sebastián, an ardent proponent of the multiverse is suspected of killing one of his "other" selves. An Austrian researcher hiding out in Spanish Sahara devises a formula for immortality to save his ailing wife only to fight off corporate types who will do anything to take possession of it. The estranged son of a billionaire thinks twice about saving his father from a deadly snakebite in Botswana. Nesbø is at his best in the long, wonderfully atmospheric title story, which shows off his gift for pulling one story out of another. Summoned to the Greek island of Kalymnos to investigate the possible murder of a man by the man's twin brother, Athens detective Nikos Balli—who specializes in sniffing out jealousy as a motive—ends up detecting an old friend's ill intentions during a mountain-climbing outing. Nesbø is less successful with "Rat Island," a baggy pandemic tale in which marauding bikers tear down the last vestiges of civilization while rich people plan their futures from the safety of a skyscraper. This story and others seem hastily drawn, and the author has a tendency to be too clever for his own good—the twistiest twists can arrive with a soft thud. But he never runs out of ideas or characters driven by inner thoughts.

Pub Date: Oct. 26, 2021

ISBN: 978-0-593-32100-3

Page Count: 560

Publisher: Knopf

Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2021

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2021

MYSTERY & DETECTIVE | SUSPENSE | THRILLER | SHORT STORIES | SUSPENSE | CRIME & LEGAL THRILLER | GENERAL MYSTERY & DETECTIVE | GENERAL THRILLER & SUSPENSE

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BOOK REVIEW

by Jo Nesbø ; translated by Neil Smith

by Jo Nesbø ; translated by Seán Kinsella

by Jo Nesbø ; translated by Robert Ferguson

THEN SHE WAS GONE

by Lisa Jewell ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 24, 2018

Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.

Ten years after her teenage daughter went missing, a mother begins a new relationship only to discover she can't truly move on until she answers lingering questions about the past.

Laurel Mack’s life stopped in many ways the day her 15-year-old daughter, Ellie, left the house to study at the library and never returned. She drifted away from her other two children, Hanna and Jake, and eventually she and her husband, Paul, divorced. Ten years later, Ellie’s remains and her backpack are found, though the police are unable to determine the reasons for her disappearance and death. After Ellie’s funeral, Laurel begins a relationship with Floyd, a man she meets in a cafe. She's disarmed by Floyd’s charm, but when she meets his young daughter, Poppy, Laurel is startled by her resemblance to Ellie. As the novel progresses, Laurel becomes increasingly determined to learn what happened to Ellie, especially after discovering an odd connection between Poppy’s mother and her daughter even as her relationship with Floyd is becoming more serious. Jewell’s ( I Found You , 2017, etc.) latest thriller moves at a brisk pace even as she plays with narrative structure: The book is split into three sections, including a first one which alternates chapters between the time of Ellie’s disappearance and the present and a second section that begins as Laurel and Floyd meet. Both of these sections primarily focus on Laurel. In the third section, Jewell alternates narrators and moments in time: The narrator switches to alternating first-person points of view (told by Poppy’s mother and Floyd) interspersed with third-person narration of Ellie’s experiences and Laurel’s discoveries in the present. All of these devices serve to build palpable tension, but the structure also contributes to how deeply disturbing the story becomes. At times, the characters and the emotional core of the events are almost obscured by such quick maneuvering through the weighty plot.

Pub Date: April 24, 2018

ISBN: 978-1-5011-5464-5

Page Count: 368

Publisher: Atria

Review Posted Online: Feb. 5, 2018

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2018

GENERAL THRILLER & SUSPENSE | SUSPENSE | FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP | SUSPENSE

More by Lisa Jewell

by Lisa Jewell

THE HOUSE ACROSS THE LAKE

by Riley Sager ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 21, 2022

A weird, wild ride.

Celebrity scandal and a haunted lake drive the narrative in this bestselling author’s latest serving of subtly ironic suspense.

Sager’s debut, Final Girls (2017), was fun and beautifully crafted. His most recent novels— Home Before Dark (2020) and Survive the Night (2021) —have been fun and a bit rickety. His new novel fits that mold. Narrator Casey Fletcher grew up watching her mother dazzle audiences, and then she became an actor herself. While she never achieves the “America’s sweetheart” status her mother enjoyed, Casey makes a career out of bit parts in movies and on TV and meatier parts onstage. Then the death of her husband sends her into an alcoholic spiral that ends with her getting fired from a Broadway play. When paparazzi document her substance abuse, her mother exiles her to the family retreat in Vermont. Casey has a dry, droll perspective that persists until circumstances overwhelm her, and if you’re getting a Carrie Fisher vibe from Casey Fletcher, that is almost certainly not an accident. Once in Vermont, she passes the time drinking bourbon and watching the former supermodel and the tech mogul who live across the lake through a pair of binoculars. Casey befriends Katherine Royce after rescuing her when she almost drowns and soon concludes that all is not well in Katherine and Tom’s marriage. Then Katherine disappears….It would be unfair to say too much about what happens next, but creepy coincidences start piling up, and eventually, Casey has to face the possibility that maybe some of the eerie legends about Lake Greene might have some truth to them. Sager certainly delivers a lot of twists, and he ventures into what is, for him, new territory. Are there some things that don’t quite add up at the end? Maybe, but asking that question does nothing but spoil a highly entertaining read.

Pub Date: June 21, 2022

ISBN: 978-0-593-18319-9

Publisher: Dutton

Review Posted Online: March 29, 2022

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2022

PSYCHOLOGICAL THRILLER | SUSPENSE | THRILLER | SUSPENSE | GENERAL THRILLER & SUSPENSE | GENERAL FICTION

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by Riley Sager

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Tuesday, november 23, 2021, the jealousy man: review.

The Jealousy Man (translated from the Norwegian by Robert Ferguson) is a book of “short” stories written by Jo Nesbo. There are 12 stories separated into two themes: jealousy and power.

The stories that stood out for me were London – a plane journey to London, with the client Maria, saddened by her husband and her best friend’s betrayal, contemplating the contract she has signed with Shaun, the passenger in the seat next to her. I felt the rapport between main characters as the story developed, and the twist at the end was perfect.

The Jealousy Man – for which the book was named is one of the more detailed of the stories, which developed and again took the reader to an unexpected result. Inspector Balli is the expert at interviewing and analysing the potential murderers in a case, with jealousy as a motive. He has personal experience that backs him. He doesn’t speak about it, but the knowledge is there. He is also a climber – which is a key element of the plot of this story. An interesting take on the application of experience.

The Cicadas – a tale of student friends Peter and Martin, on holiday in Europe, with concepts of time travel, murder and love combined in an unexpected way. A girl called Mariam that Martin rescues from drowning and falls in love with, but whom Peter also wants, and the running of the bulls provide an ideal opportunity for death to visit.

And then there is Shredder – a clever tale of investigative ability and discovery, saddened by the progressive illness of a loved one, combined with a growing realisation of how dangerous his invention is, and then the final ability to remove, to shred that knowledge and secrets before it ends in the wrong hands, and before the inventor himself gives way.

Rat Island was no doubt inspired in part by the Covid pandemic, but ultimately a little too dark, and gory for me, as was Dark Knight – a wordy read in Nesbo style, with the evil very present and near.

Some of the other books by the same author: Harry Hole Thrillers: The Bat, Cockroaches, Phantom. Standalone Crime: Headhunters, Midnight Sun, Blood on the Snow, The Kingdom.

Nesbo is a world-renowned bestselling crime writer. His books have been translated into 50 languages and have sold over 45 million copies worldwide. Before becoming a crime writer, Nesbo played football for Norway’s Premier league team Molde, but gave up on his dream due to injuries. He completed three years of military Service, and then attended Business School, where he received a degree in Economics. Whilst studying, he formed a band called Di Derre (Them There), which topped the charts in Norway. Nesbo worked as a financial analyst during the day and gigged with the band at night. When he was asked to write a memoir of his life on the road, he went to Australia for six months, and instead came up with the plot for his first Harry Hole crime Novel – The Bat . Nesbo was born in 1960, and grew up in Molde in Western Norway. He is now 60 years of age, and lives in Oslo.

Nesbo is not my favourite author, but in short story format, there was a selection that will tick the boxes for most readers of suspense thrillers to enjoy. - Christine E Hann

The Jealousy Man (Translated from the Norwegian by Robert Ferguson) is published by Penguin Random House UK – 2021. ISBN: 978-1-78730-312-6

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Harry Hole Thrillers

The Jealousy Man

A page-turning collection of dark and twisted crime stories

Murder. Assassination. Revenge.

Discover the first short story collection from the King of Scandi Crime.

Meet a detective on the trail of a man suspected of murdering his twin; a hired assassin facing his greatest adversary; and two passengers meeting by chance on a plane, spelling romance or something far more sinister.

In his first ever collection of short stories, this master of crime delivers a gripping, edge-of-your seat read that you won’t be able to put down.

**Shortlisted for the Crime Writers’ Association Dagger Awards 2022**

The 12 tales in this impressive collection from bestseller Nesbo blend taut suspense with sharply limned characters

Publishers Weekly *Starred Review*

Richly atmospheric tales

Choice Magazine

A veritable crime lover’s delight from a true master of mystery and suspense

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The Jealousy Man: From the Sunday Times No.1 bestselling author of the Harry Hole series Hardcover – 30 Sept. 2021

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**THE NO.1 SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER** TWELEVE DARK GRIPPING TWISTS FROM THE KING OF SCANDI CRIME Meet a detective on the trail of a man suspected of murdering his twin; a hired assassin facing his greatest adversary; and two passengers meeting by chance on a plane, spelling romance or something far more sinister. In this thrilling new collection the master of crime delivers a gripping, edge-of-your seat read that you won't be able to put down. **Shortlisted for the Crime Writers' Association Dagger Awards 2022** *JO NESBO HAS SOLD OVER 55 MILLION BOOKS WORLDWIDE* *Watch out for KILLING MOON , the new Jo Nesbo book, out now* PRAISE FOR JO NESBO: 'A storyteller with few equals' Daily Express 'Deliciously dark' Heat 'Nightmare-inducing and terrific' The Times READERS LOVE JO NESBO: ***** 'Intriguing, mysterious, full of suspense' Netgalley reader ***** 'To say I couldn't put it down is an understatement...' Netgalley reader ***** 'A great read with plenty of twists and surprises' Netgalley read

• Print length 528 pages
• Language English
• Publisher Harvill Secker
• Publication date 30 Sept. 2021
• Dimensions 16.2 x 4.5 x 24 cm
• ISBN-10 1787303128
• ISBN-13 978-1787303126
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The 12 tales in this impressive collection from bestseller Nesbø blend taut suspense with sharply limned characters. /.../ Frederick Forsyth fans will be enthralled.

A veritable crime lover's delight from a true master of mystery and suspense. Experience the #1 New York Times bestselling author as never before in this dark and thrilling short story collection that takes us on a journey of twisted minds and vengeful hearts. Jo Nesbø is known the world over as a consummate mystery/thriller writer. Famed for his deft characterization, hair-raising suspense and shocking twists, Nesbø's dexterity with the dark corners of the human heart is on full display in these inventive and enthralling stories. /.../ With Nesbø's characteristic gift for outstanding atmosphere and gut-wrenching revelations, The Jealousy Man confirms that he is at the peak of his abilities.

Nesbø delivers stories ranging from dystopian visions to time-honored tales of duplicity and revenge. /.../ Nesbø is at his best in the long, wonderfully atmospheric title story, which shows off his gift for pulling one story out of another.

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• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Harvill Secker (30 Sept. 2021)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 528 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1787303128
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1787303126
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 16.2 x 4.5 x 24 cm
• 1,033 in Crime, Thriller & Mystery Short Stories
• 6,019 in Short Stories (Books)
• 7,453 in Police Procedurals (Books)

About the author

Jo Nesbo is one of the world’s bestselling crime writers, with The Leopard, Phantom, Police, The Son and his latest Harry Hole novel, The Thirst, all topping the Sunday Times bestseller charts. He's an international number one bestseller and his books are published in 50 languages, selling over 33 million copies around the world.

Before becoming a crime writer, Nesbo played football for Norway’s premier league team Molde, but his dream of playing professionally for Spurs was dashed when he tore ligaments in his knee at the age of eighteen. After three years military service he attended business school and formed the band Di derre ('Them There'). They topped the charts in Norway, but Nesbo continued working as a financial analyst, crunching numbers during the day and gigging at night. When commissioned by a publisher to write a memoir about life on the road with his band, he instead came up with the plot for his first Harry Hole crime novel, The Bat.

Sign up to the Jo Nesbo newsletter for all the latest news: jonesbo.com/newsletter

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The Jealousy Man and Other Stories

Jo nesbø, trans. from the from the norwegian by robert ferguson. knopf, $28.95 (528p) isbn 978-0-593-32100-3.

Reviewed on: 08/11/2021

Genre: Mystery/Thriller

Hardcover - 528 pages - 978-1-0390-0171-8

Paperback - 624 pages - 978-0-593-31557-6

Paperback - 736 pages - 978-0-593-50390-4

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Alice Munro, Nobel Laureate and Master of the Short Story, Dies at 92

Her stories were widely considered to be without equal, a mixture of ordinary people and extraordinary themes.

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By Anthony DePalma

Alice Munro, the revered Canadian author who started writing short stories because she did not think she had the time or the talent to master novels, then stubbornly dedicated her long career to churning out psychologically dense stories that dazzled the literary world and earned her the Nobel Prize in Literature, died on Monday night in Port Hope, Ontario, east of Toronto. She was 92.

A spokesman for her publisher, Penguin Random House Canada, confirmed the death, at a nursing home. Ms. Munro’s health had declined since at least 2009, when she said she’d had heart bypass surgery and had been treated for cancer, though she continued to write.

Ms. Munro was a member of the rare breed of writer, like Katherine Anne Porter and Raymond Carver, who made their reputations in the notoriously difficult literary arena of the short story, and did so with great success. Her tales — many of them focused on women at different stages of their lives coping with complex desires — were so eagerly received and gratefully read that she attracted a whole new generation of readers.

Ms. Munro’s stories were widely considered to be without equal, a mixture of ordinary people and extraordinary themes. She portrayed small-town folks, often in rural southwestern Ontario, facing situations that made the fantastic seem an everyday occurrence. Some of her characters were fleshed out so completely through generations and across continents that readers reached a level of intimacy with them that usually comes only with a full-length novel.

She achieved such compactness through exquisite craftsmanship and a degree of precision that did not waste words. Other writers declared some of her stories to be near-perfect — a heavy burden for a writer of modest personal character who had struggled to overcome a lack of self-confidence at the beginning of her career, when she left the protective embrace of her quiet hometown and ventured into the competitive literary scene.

Her insecurity, however powerfully she felt it, was never noticed by her fellow writers, who celebrated her craftsmanship and freely lent her their highest praise.

The Irish novelist Edna O’Brien ranked Ms. Munro with William Faulkner and James Joyce as writers who had influenced her work. Joyce Carol Oates said Munro stories “have the density — moral, emotional, sometimes historical — of other writers’ novels.” And the novelist Richard Ford once made it clear that questioning Ms. Munro’s mastery over the short story would be akin to doubting the hardness of a diamond or the bouquet of a ripened peach.

“With Alice it’s like a shorthand,” Mr. Ford said. “You’ll just mention her, and everybody just kind of generally nods that she’s just sort of as good as it gets.”

In awarding her the Nobel in 2013 , when she was 82, the Swedish Academy cited her 14 collections of stories and referred to her as “a master of the contemporary short story,” praising her ability to “accommodate the entire epic complexity of the novel in just a few short pages.”

As famous for the refined exuberance of her prose as for the modesty of her personal life, Ms. Munro declined to travel to Sweden to accept her Nobel, saying she was too frail. In place of the formal lecture that winners traditionally give, she taped a long interview in Victoria, British Columbia, where she had been visiting when her award was announced. When asked if the process of writing her stories had consumed her entirely, she responded that it did, then added, “But you know, I always got lunch for my children.”

During the presentation of the taped interview at the Swedish Academy, the Swedish actress Pernilla August read an excerpt from Ms. Munro’s story “Carried Away,” a multi-decade tale of dashed expectations that typified the complicated, often disappointing, world of her stories.

“She had a picture taken. She knew how she wanted it to be,” the excerpt read. “She would have liked to wear a simple white blouse, a peasant girl’s smock with the string open at the neck. She did not own a blouse of that description and in fact had only seen them in pictures. And she would have liked to let her hair down. Or if it had to be up, she would have liked it piled very loosely and bound with strings of pearls.

“Instead she wore her blue silk shirtwaist and bound her hair as usual. She thought the picture made her look rather pale, hollow-eyed. Her expression was sterner and more foreboding than she had intended. She sent it anyway.”

‘Our Chekhov’

Ms. Munro’s early success in Canada, where her first collection of stories, “Dance of the Happy Shades” (1968), won the Governor General’s Literary Award, the equivalent of a Pulitzer Prize for fiction, spread to the United States after her stories began to be published in The New Yorker in 1977. She was an important member of a generation of Canadian writers, along with Margaret Atwood and Michael Ondaatje, whose celebrity reached far beyond the country’s borders.

Ms. Munro went on to win the Governor General’s award twice more, along with two Giller Prizes, another important national award in Canada, and many other honors. In 2009, she withdrew her collection “Too Much Happiness” from consideration for yet another Giller because she believed that a younger writer should have a chance to win it.

That same year she was awarded the Man Booker International Prize for her lifelong body of work, which the judges claimed was “practically perfect.” The awards committee commented that although she was known mostly as a short-story writer, “she brings as much depth, wisdom and precision to every story as most novelists bring to a lifetime of novels.”

“To read Alice Munro is to learn something every time that you never thought of before,” the judges said.

As her many-layered style developed, her short stories came to be neither short nor simply stories — she included 15 stories in her first book, but only eight or nine longer ones in some of her most recent collections. The greater length of each story gave her room to explore the psychological profiles of her characters more fully, and the resulting works are tightly woven tapestries of great tension, lasting resonance and stunning breadth that combine the emotional thrust of a novel with the pinpoint power of a masterful poem.

Over the years, her stories seemed to grow darker and more paradoxical, even though she often described her own life as ordinary and generally upbeat. Often her characters were simple people confronting unusual circumstances. But those situations could be odd, even bizarre, such as an accident in which a soldier who returned from war is decapitated after his sleeve is caught in a factory machine, or the actions of an unattractive girl who steals so much money from her parents’ store to pay boys for sex that her parents are forced to declare bankruptcy. The women in her stories tended to be emotionally pierced — divorced women, adulteresses and noble victims of life’s vicissitudes.

Like Faulkner, Eudora Welty and the other Southern writers she admired, Ms. Munro was capable of breathing life into an entire world — for her, the importunate countryside of southwestern Ontario and the placid, occasionally threatening presence of Lake Huron.

Cynthia Ozick called her “our Chekhov,” and the description stuck.

In a 2009 review of “Too Much Happiness,” Michiko Kakutani of The New York Times described the collection’s title story as “a brilliant distillation of her Chekhovian art.”

Never a Novel

Ms. Munro was able to live a life remarkable for its normalcy. Her days, like her characters’, were filled with quotidian routines punctuated by the explosive mystery of happenstance and accident.

Outside of a decade spent on the west coast of Canada during her first marriage, she lived with a great deal of satisfaction in the Ontario bramble she celebrated in her stories, quietly composing them in the house where her second husband was raised, not far from the place where she was born.

Perhaps the question that most dogged her throughout her long career was why, with her abundant talents and perceptive eye, she restricted herself to what is generally seen as the limited world of the short story rather than launch into the glittery universe of the novel.

“I don’t really understand a novel,” Ms. Munro confessed to Mervyn Rothstein of The Times in a 1986 interview. “I don’t understand where the excitement is supposed to come in a novel, and I do in a story. There’s a kind of tension that if I’m getting a story right I can feel right away.”

While one of her early collections, “Lives of Girls and Women,” is sometimes called a novel, Ms. Munro and her longtime editor at Alfred A. Knopf, Ann Close, considered it a collection of linked stories.

“Once I started to write that, I was off,” she told The Paris Review. “Then I made a big mistake. I tried to make it a regular novel, an ordinary sort of childhood adolescence novel. About March I saw it wasn’t working. It didn’t feel right to me, and I thought I would have to abandon it. I was very depressed. Then it came to me that what I had to do was pull it apart and put it in the story form. Then I could handle it.”

At times she swore she would never write a novel — almost dismissing the challenge as too great for her to even attempt. But at other times she seemed to wistfully wonder, as one of her characters might, how different her life might have been had she written a blockbuster novel.

“I’m thinking of something now, how it might be a novel, but I bet you it won’t be,” she said in a 1998 interview, just after publication of her widely acclaimed collection “The Love of a Good Woman.” She confessed that on occasion she had experimented with stretching her stories into novels but said she found that the stories “start to sag” when she did so, as though being taken beyond their natural limits. Still, the lure never completely evaporated. “My ambition is to write a novel before I die,” she said, also in 1998.

She never did.

Shortly before receiving her Nobel in 2013, Ms. Munro told several interviewers that she had decided to stop writing. As far back as 2009, she had disclosed her cancer diagnosis and that she’d undergone heart bypass surgery. Her declining health had robbed her of strength, but she also remarked that she’d been writing since she was 20 and had grown weary of what Del, a character in “Lives of Girls and Women” who is generally taken to be Ms. Munro’s proxy, says is a writer’s only duty, which is “to produce a masterpiece.”

“That’s a long time to be working,” Ms. Munro said, “and I thought maybe it’s time to take it easy.”

Rural Beginnings

Alice Ann Laidlaw was born on July 10, 1931, in the village of Wingham, Ontario, hard by the banks of Lake Huron. She was the first of three children of Robert Eric Laidlaw and Anne Clarke (Chamney) Laidlaw. Her father had tried his luck at the rather exotic undertaking of raising silver foxes and mink, but when that failed he went through a number of professions, including stints as foundry watchman and turkey farmer.

When Anne Laidlaw developed Parkinson’s disease, it fell to Alice, not yet a teenager but the oldest of the three children, to care for her mother, an experience that she wove through her writing. She was able to attend college after winning a two-year scholarship to the University of Western Ontario in London, Ontario, about 65 miles south of Wingham.

She majored in English but initially kept her ambition to write fiction to herself. She dropped out before completing her studies and married a fellow student, James Munro. She sold her first short work of fiction, a story, to the radio service of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.

The Munros settled in Vancouver and had two children; a third died at birth. Ms. Munro said the domestic demands of those years — balancing parenthood with her dream of writing, “getting apple juice, answering the phone and letting the cat in” — left her no time or energy for ambitious projects like writing novels. Instead, she dedicated herself to mastering the short story, a form that she felt she could manage in between raising her children and taking care of her house.

In 1963, Ms. Munro and her husband moved to Victoria, where she helped him found a bookstore, Munro’s, and gave birth to another daughter. The marriage ended in 1973, and she moved back to Ontario.

By then, her literary reputation in Canada was established. In 1968, her first book, “Dance of the Happy Shades,” a collection of short stories compiled over a dozen years, introduced readers to what would later be widely recognized as “Alice Munro Country” — the rigidly introspective landscape of solitary country roads and stolid houses of yellow brick within which shy lives and solemn secrets unfolded.

“Everybody knows what a house does, how it encloses space and makes connections between one enclosed space and another and presents what is outside in a new way,” she wrote in a 1982 essay. “That is the nearest I can come to explaining what a story is for me.”

Her stories are blanketed with countless small but sharp observations that animate Munro Country. For instance, in “Spaceships Have Landed,” a story in the collection “Open Secrets” (1994), the main character drunkenly flirts with her boyfriend’s friend, only to be grossly insulted by him. The next day, she calls him to the porch of her house and confronts him while using a piece of steel wool to clean freshly laid eggs.

Such details evoke a sense of the semirural Canadian backcountry, a quiet land where people never deliberately call attention to themselves and the ordinariness of life can be suddenly disrupted by accidents, arrivals and unanticipated departures.

Although Ms. Munro was most often described as a Canadian writer, her stories evoked not Canada itself but the bittersweet triumphs, mishaps and humiliations of small town life. And in the end, every landscape served as backdrop for her central themes, which were the unpredictability of life and the betrayals that women suffer or commit — scenes redolent with autobiography.

In “The Albanian Virgin,” a celebrated story featuring a rare exotic setting as well as the familiar Canadian landscape, the female protagonist runs a bookstore in Victoria and dreamily contemplates the errant directions taken by her life: “But I was not despondent. I had made a desperate change in my life, and in spite of the regrets that I suffered every day, I was proud of that. I felt as if I had finally come out into the world in a new, true, skin.”

A Publicity-Shy ‘Plodder’

Ms. Munro shunned much of the publicity usually associated with literary success and limited her book tour appearances and readings. She often referred to herself in a self-deprecating way; she said she had not “come out of the closet” as a professional writer until she was 40, and she called herself a “plodder” because of the slow and deliberate way she worked, often writing in her nightclothes for several hours in the morning and then extensively revising her stories before sending them off.

But to critics, there was nothing plodding about her stories, which were put together so seamlessly that the many flashbacks, flash-forwards and shifts in time and place that she employed happened without notice. She often started her stories at a point where other authors might end theirs, and continued them well past the climax or denouement that would have satisfied others less driven by the twists of fate. Inevitably, this left readers to work out who exactly the narrator was and how one character was related to another.

Eventually, though, every piece would fit together. “It’s like a child’s puzzle,” the novelist Anne Tyler once said of Ms. Munro’s work. “In the most successful of the stories, the end result is a satisfying click as everything settles precisely into place.”

After the turbulence and dislocation she went through before Ms. Munro turned 40, her life and career clicked satisfyingly into place when she returned to southern Ontario. She started seeing Gerald Fremlin, a geographer, and after a brief romance married him and moved into the house in Clinton, Ontario, where he was raised.

She is survived by her daughters, Sheila, Jenny and Andrea. Sheila Munro is the author of the 2001 memoir “Lives of Mothers and Daughters: Growing Up With Alice Munro.”

She embarked on an ambitious schedule of publishing a collection of short stories every three or four years, winning praise and admiration across Canada, where she comes close to being a household literary saint. After receiving her first Governor General’s award, she won it twice more, for “Who Do You Think You Are?” in 1978 and for “The Progress of Love” in 1986.

In 1998, she received the Giller Prize for “The Love of a Good Woman,” and in 2004 she picked up another for “Runaway.” After the National Book Critics Circle agreed for the first time to consider authors from outside the United States for its award, Ms. Munro won in 1998 for “The Love of a Good Woman.”

As if she were a character in one of her stories, plagued by bad timing and unlucky happenstance, Ms. Munro was not at home when the Swedish Academy called to tell her that she had won; it had to leave a telephone message. She was in Victoria visiting her daughter, who heard the news and woke her mother at 4 a.m. Still groggy when interviewed by the CBC, Ms. Munro admitted that she’d forgotten that the prize was to be awarded that day, calling it “a splendid thing to happen,” adding, “more than I can say.”

Struggling to control her emotions, she reflected on her success and what it might mean for literature. “My stories have gotten around quite remarkably for short stories,” she told the interviewer. “I would really hope that this would make people see the short story as an important art, not something you play around with until you got a novel written.”

Lisa D. Awano and Sofia Poznansky contributed reporting.

An earlier version of this obituary misspelled the given name of an author who praised Ms. Munro’s writing. She is Anne Tyler, not Ann.

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