The View from Castle Rock is a book of short stories by Canadian author Alice Munro, recipient of the 2013 Nobel Prize in Literature, which was published in 2006 by McClelland and Stewart.

The first part of the book narrates the lives of members of the Laidlaw branch of the family tree of the author, starting from their Scottish origins in the 18th century.

Will O'Phaup was a mythical man, who was a prodigious runner, a bootlegger, and a heavy drinker; he had encounters with fairies and ghosts.

Thomas Boston was the local presbyterian preacher at the same time; he wrote on matters of faith, he was obsessed with religious guilt, his ideas were borderline heretical, he had a very hard life.

The title stems from the event when James took his ten-year-old child Andrew to the top of the Rock of Edinburgh Castle to show him the coast of America (actually Fife).

He meets a rich girl suffering from tuberculosis; her father suggests he follow them and get a job in his business, but Walter refuses.

The oldest of the children, Jamie, steals his newborn sister Jane and tries to direct the blame on a half-Indian neighbor.

During the war, when Alice was a young girl, the business started to go bad, but was saved by the mother who managed to sell their furs to American tourists.

The author recalls the days of school and specifically the relationship with two schoolmates, Dahlia Newcombe and Frances Wainwright.

The young Alice one day entered the property to lie under her blossoming apple trees, to satisfy a literary fancy.

Surprisingly, this same aunt gives the narrator a big amount of money to get out of her marriage in case it doesn't work out.

In one of their houses Alice, as a child, could put her ear to a big mother-of-pearl seashell and hear the sound of the sea and her blood.