Chronicles of Avonlea

Chronicles of Avonlea is a collection of twelve warm, witty short stories set in the fictional village of Prince Edward Island that L.M. Montgomery populated with such care in her Anne novels. But here's the secret: Anne herself appears only fleetingly. These are stories about the other residents of Avonlea, the neighbors and farmers and dreamers who existed in the margins of Anne's world. There's Ludovic Speed, who has courted Theodora Dix for fifteen years without ever quite managing to propose, and the hilarious quarantine scenario where a man-hating woman and her cat are locked in with a woman-hating bachelor and his dog. There are stubborn lovers at Penhallow Grange who refuse to speak to each other for years, and Old Man Shaw waiting for his daughter to come home. Montgomery wrote most of these stories before Anne of Green Gables existed, then lovingly retrofitted them into her beloved village. The result is a book that captures something the Anne novels, for all their brilliance, only hint at: the texture of everyday life in a small community, where love moves slowly, gossip is a sport, and everyone has secrets they think no one notices.