Runaway - (Vintage International) by Alice Munro (Paperback)

About the Book

"Runaway" is the first story in this stunning collection, sure to be a runaway success. All of the eight stories are new, published in book form for the first time--a special feast for the millions of Munro fans around the world.

Book Synopsis

NATIONAL BESTSELLER - Eight "sparkling [and] beautifully drawn" (Entertainment Weekly) stories about love and its infinite betrayals and surprises, from Nobel Prize-winning author Alice Munro

"Each of the stories in Runaway contains enough lived life to fill a typical novel."--The Boston Globe

One of the New York Times's 100 Best Books of the 21st Century

WINNER OF THE GILLER PRIZE - A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: The New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Atlantic Monthly, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, San Jose Mercury News, Kansas City Star

The runaway of the title story is a young woman who, though she thinks she wants to, is incapable of leaving her husband. In "Passion," a country girl emerging into the larger world via a job in a resort hotel discovers a single moment of stunning insight and the limits and lies of that mysterious emotion. Three stories, the inspiration for the award-winning movie Julieta, are about a woman named Juliet--in the first, she escapes from teaching at a girls' school into a wild and irresistible love match; in the second she returns with her child to the home of her parents, whose life and marriage she finally begins to examine; and in the last, her child, caught, she mistakenly thinks, in the grip of a religious cult, vanishes into an unexplained and profound silence. In the final story, "Powers," a young woman with the ability to read the future sets off a chain of events that involves her husband-to-be and a friend in a lifelong pursuit of what such a gift really means, and who really has it.

In Munro's hands, the people she writes about--women of all ages and circumstances, and their friends, lovers, parents, and children--become as vivid as our own neighbors. It is her miraculous gift to make these stories as real and unforgettable as our own.

Review Quotes

"Alice Munro has a strong claim to being the best fiction writer now working in North America. Runaway is a marvel."--Jonathan Franzen, The New York Times Book Review

"Runaway may very well be the synthesizing work of one of literature's keenest investigators into the human soul."--USA Today

"She outjoices Joyce and checkmates Chekhov. . . . Each of the stories in Runaway contains enough lived life to fill a typical novel. . . . Her women are heroic. . . . They endure in the mind of the reader."--The Boston Globe

"As with so many of Munro's stories, you read to have your premises altered and deepened. Could anything be better? . . . A beautiful new work."--Los Angeles Times

"The great Alice Munro proves again why short-story writers bow down toher."--Vanity Fair

"Runaway is a big dish of Beluga caviar, sailing in on a sparkling bed of ice, with a mother-of-pearl spoon. You remember: This is why you eat, read, make love, whatever--to be left silly with admiration and delight."--The Washington Post

About the Author

Alice Munro is the author of thirteen collections of stories--including Dear Life, Runaway, and Too Much Happiness--as well as a novel, Lives of Girls and Women. Among the many awards and prizes she received are three Governor General's Literary Awards and two Giller Prizes in Canada; the Rea Award; the Lannan Literary Award; the National Book Critics Circle Award; and the International Booker Prize. Her stories have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The Paris Review, and other publications, and her collections have been translated into thirteen languages. She was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2013. Alice Munro died in 2024.