Runaway [Hardcover]

Alice Munro (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 3, 2005

At the centre of Runaway are three stories connected into one marvellously rich, long narrative, about Juliet - who escapes from teaching at a girls' school into a wild and passionate love match; then returns to the home of her parents, whose life and curious marriage she finally begins to examine; while in the third part of her story, her vanished child turns up caught in the grip of a religious cult. The whole picture emerges only when all the pieces of the jigsaw are finally in place. The runaway of the disturbing title story is Carla, a congenital 'bolter', who has neighbourly fantasies that take on a frightening afterlife...Elsewhere, a stagestruck girl finds life is more Shakespearean than even she imagines; while Tessa, a young country woman with strange powers cannot foresee what will happen if she makes off with a plausible charmer. Munro's stories unravel layers of the past, and different versions of the truth: her characters learn that if you look too closely at anything - the past, the truth - it may crumble. Runaway is about the power and betrayals, and twists, of love, about lost children, lost chances. There is pain and desolation beneath the surface, like a needle in the heart, which makes them more powerful and compelling than anything she has written. Munro is a magician with words, but also with layers of life and emotion.

Editorial Reviews

Review

“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 to her.” –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


From the Trade Paperback edition. --This text refers to the Kindle Edition edition.

About the Author

Alice Munro is the author of The Beggar Maid (shortlisted for the Booker Prize) a novel and several outstanding collections of stories, including Open Secrets (winner of the WHSmith Literary Award), and Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage. Her work appears regularly in The New Yorker and she is a winner of the Giller Prize and the Governor General's Prize in her native Canada.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 356 pages
• Publisher: Chatto Bodley Head & Cape (February 3, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0701177500
• ISBN-13: 978-0701177508
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.7 x 1.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (44 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,292,145 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Alice Munro grew up in Wingham, Ontario, and attended the University of Western Ontario. She has published eleven previous books.During her distinguished career she has been the recipient of many awards and prizes, including the W.H. Smith Prize, the National Book Circle Critics Award, the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in Short Fiction, the Lannan Literary Award, the Commonwealth Writers' Prize, and the Rea Award for the Short Story. In Canada, she has won the Governor General's Award, the Giller Prize, the Trillium Book Award, and the Libris Award.Alice Munro and her husband divide their time between Clinton, Ontario, and Comox, British Columbia.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

30 of 30 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Northern Star, January 22, 2008

By 

H. Schneider "Hamlet" (Pandistan) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Runaway (Paperback)

Somebody around here nominated Munro for a Nobel prize and for the title of strongest writer in the English language. Tempted by so much praise from a trustworthy source, I tested/tasted the Runaway and I second the motion.
The title story itself is one of the best long short stories that I can remember. (But I would still like to know what happened to Flora...)
The story called 'Silence' is a very troubling horror story out of real life.
Munro writes about daily life and 'human' relations and neighborhood problems and life stories, including several versions of plausible horror, with a simplicity and precision that can only be achieved through hard work (or through lucky genius). She is entirely free of mannerisms and of cheap tricks (unlike other contemporary American writers that I am just having a big disagreement about.)
Outstanding.

59 of 65 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Beautiful Stories, December 24, 2005

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Great Faulkner's Ghost (Washington, DC) - See all my reviews
(TOP 1000 REVIEWER)   

This review is from: Runaway (Paperback)

If you have not read Alice Munro, how I envy you. You have so much pleasure ahead of you. She writes for us about wonder- the wonder of everyday life; the small things; the touching things; the things that make you say, yes, this is the human heart; all of these are her fictional world, much as they are our pasts, and our presents. This is a strong collection and an excellent place to get to know what she is about. After this, explore her backlist. My personal favorite besides this is an early collection called,The Moons of Jupiter, which is still in print in a nice paperbak format. I hope you enjoy discovering her as much as I have.

24 of 26 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars So beautiful, you hardly know that it hurts., August 6, 2006

By 

frumiousb "frumiousb" (Amsterdam, the Netherlands) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (TOP 500 REVIEWER)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Runaway (Paperback)

Munro is an absolutely gorgeous writer. I was discussing this book with some friends over dinner and we all realized that the more we talked, the more sadness we saw in the stories. The prose is so luminous and the characters are so real, it is easy to forget the quiet and unquiet desperation that their lives are describing.

Runaway seems to be a meditation on several themes. The obvious one is the idea of flight. Her characters flee in a multitude of ways-- successfully, unsuccessfully, with large rebellion and small. Small town life with all its constraints and beauty is explored through the context of young women trying to come to terms with its limitations.

This book would be suitable for anyone who is a lover of strong character-driven fiction (short or otherwise). If you read and appreciate writers like Marilynne Robinson, then this will likely be a book for you. It will be high on my list of books to be given as a gift this year.