Alice Munro

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Runaway

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.