Runaway
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3.9 • 47 Ratings
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Nothing is new in Munro's latest collection, which is to say that the author continues to perfect her virtuosic formula in these eight short stories, several of which previously appeared in the New Yorker. While her style typifies the traditionally realistic, often domestic genre of that magazine, Munro's stories are also global, bighearted and warm. In the title story, a housekeeper tries to leave her emotionally abusive husband, entangling her employer in the process. Three interconnected stories "Chance," "Soon" and "Silence" follow a schoolteacher as she falls for an older man, returns as a young mother to visit her ailing parents on their farm and much later tries to "rescue" her daughter from a religious cult. In "Tricks," a lonely nurse on a day trip encounters a man from Montenegro and vows to return to his clock shop one year later to resume their affair. In deliberate prose, Munro captures their fleeting moment of passion on a train platform: "This talk felt more and more like an agreed-upon subterfuge, like a conventional screen for what was becoming more inevitable all the time, more necessary, between them." Munro's characters are hopeful and proud as they face both the betrayals and gestures of kindness that animate their relationships. One never knows quite where a Munro story will end, only that it will leave an incandescent trail of psychological insight.
Customer Reviews
So perfect and simple!
These stories are so unassuming, so. . ., well, I don't want to say ordinary, so let's say quotidian. You don't realize how they are affecting you, until you finish them, and everything that has filled you up leaves you. Through the simplest words and action, she creates something so vivid and relatable. I can see why she's so famous.
I loved the stories about Juliet. (CHANCE, SOON, SILENCE). The first story (RUNAWAY) was great as well. I was totally thrown on any motivations of the characters. She gave you just enough to try and figure everything out. Such subtlety is appreciated. Also, PASSION, was wonderful. The plot was a shocker, but the motivations, one's ability to act impulsively, in a dream-like state almost, was captured here. We have all certainly had inexplicable moments such as these. I think my favorite, plotwise, was "Tricks", seeing as I'm simultaneously reading Stephen King's THE DARK HALF.
All in all---really wonderful stuff. I read this collection because I was so moved by THE LOVE OF A GOOD WOMAN. I'm adding something else to my list to read right now.