For Munro, it seems, death is a silencing of each human story. Enid, the protagonist of the opening story, toys with possible death after Mrs Quinn, a young wife dying of kidney failure in Enid's care, reveals her complicity in a murder. But how much of what we do and say is really true? As the ailing Mrs Quinn says, "I bet it's all lies."

As we create our own fictions out of reality, so Munro's writing conjures fiction from life. Her eye (and indeed ear) for detail reaches right into the immediate experience of the tangible world, whether evoking the wild Canadian landscape as seen from a train window or recreating the harsh, oath-laden accents of a murderer wanted for triple homicide. The latter may sound too dramatic for the succinctness demanded by the short story, but in Munro's skilled hands the tragedies of life pass from crescendo to diminuendo, and thence into tunes played below the surface of each individual's own preoccupations.

Collections of unrelated short stories suffer from an unsatisfying lack of completeness. The same characters link all the stories taken from her 2004 collection Runaway and clearly there is more to the narrative this creates than the triptych of stories chosen for this new volume.

Despite this, reading Munro's New Selected Stories is like taking a masterclass in the genre. To read a short-story collection cover-to-cover is a habit-forming pattern of reading. You finish one story and then mentally prepare yourself for the next. The unexpected becomes a theme thanks to Munro's grasp of the extent to which we are creatures of habit, and her ability to play on this.