Lying Under the Apple Tree, by Alice Munro

Second paragraph of third story ("My Mother's Dream"):

My mother looked out from a big arched window such as you find in a mansion or an old-fashioned public building. She looked down on lawns and shrubs, hedges, flower gardens, trees, all covered by snow that lay in heaps and cushions, not levelled or disturbed by wind. The white of it did not hurt your eyes as it does in sunlight. The white was the white of snow under a clear sky just before dawn. Everything was still; it was like "O Little Town of Bethlehem" except that the stars had gone out.

This is a sort of "Best of" collection, with three stories each from five of Alice Munro's short story collections. I had read three of these (The Love of a Good Woman, Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage and Too Much Happiness) but not the other two (Runaway and The View from Castle Rock, which includes the title story). They're all really good, as per usual, though I remembered very little about the nine out of fifteen that I know I had already read. (More than five years ago.) I think I'd recommend getting the individual collections separately, rather than the "Greatest Hits". Still, you can get it here.

This was the non-genre fiction work that had lingered longest unread on my shelves. Next on that pile is A Darker Shade, edited by Jean-Henri Holmberg, but I'm going to leave it until I've finished all the sf and non-fiction books I acquired in 2015.

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