Runaway
"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.
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Become an affiliate"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
Praise from fellow writers: "Her work felt revolutionary when I came to it, and it still does." --Jhumpa Lahiri "She is one of the handful of writers, some living, most dead, whom I have in mind when I say that fiction is my religion." --Jonthan Franzen "The authority she brings to the page is just lovely." --Elizabeth Strout "She's the most savage writer I've ever read, also the most tender, the most honest, the most perceptive." --Jeffery Eugenides "Alice Munro can move characters through time in a way that no other writer can."--Julian Barnes "She is a short-story writer who...reimagined what a story can do." --Loorie Moore "There's probably no one alive who's better at the craft of the short story." --Jim Shepard "A true master of the form." --Salman Rushdie "A wonderful writer." --Joyce Carol Oates