Alice Munro has been accused of telling the same story over and over, and to a certain extent the characterization is true. Her subject matter is inevitably the vagaries of love between middle-aged people in some rural Canadian setting, trapped there by the combination of their desires and weaknesses. Or, if not love, then at least the mysteries of relationships as characters struggle to understand each other and themselves. But this thematic single-mindedness can hardly be considered a criticism considering Munro tells stories better than anybody else and with a level of precision matched by few. It would be like criticizing Shakespeare for writing about politics.

Runaway is no exception. The stories take place throughout Canada--northern Ontario, the Prairies, the West Coast, Stratford--and feature women and men drifting in and out of each other's orbits, pulled by forces they don't understand. In "Runaway," a woman considers leaving her husband with the help of a neighbor, but the husband has other plans. In "Chance," a woman leaves her life behind in a quest for a man she met on a train crossing the country. Their intertwined lives play out through two more stories, "Soon" and "Silence," but the path they follow is as unpredictable to the reader as it is to them. In "Trespasses," a small town's women dream of escaping their lives only to find themselves in lives they never imagined.

What really marks the stories is Munro's sense of mood. There's a sense of hidden menace or even violence everywhere in Runaway. It occasionally erupts, but always in surprising and unexpected ways, and with unintended consequences. Munro may be an old-fashioned storyteller, but she understands chaos theory well enough. The same story? Sure. But it's a damn good one. --Peter Darbyshire, Amazon.ca

From Bookmarks Magazine
Often compared to Eudora Welty, Anton Chekhov, and James Joyce, Munro is a brilliant short story-writer. She mines the small towns of her native Ontario for inspiration, penning short stories (30-40 pages each) that possess the depth of novels. Runaway, her tenth collection, contains her trademark unconventional plots and lost characters. Critics agree that the suspense and drama lodged within the characters give each story its power. Like the best writers, Munro involves readers in her characters’ thoughts and actions, "coaxing trust out of our hands before we realize we had it to give away" (The Oregonian). The tiniest details relate to the largest themes—and most, involving women—are not happy. As the Seattle Times notes, Munro introduces "tougher and chillier than usual" moments than in previous collections, like 1994’s Open Secrets. But, even with a darker view of human nature, Munro "sings, and her women are heroic" (Boston Globe). Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc.

From AudioFile
The subtle and exquisitely polished stories of Alice Munro are among the literary marvels of our time, and Kymberly Dakin conveys effectively the peculiar blend of Canadian "haut provincialism" that provides the tone, context, and so much of the humor of Munro's finest stories. Each of these eight stories features a runaway of some kind; dramatic events are most often filtered through the consciousness and recollection of the female protagonist. Dakin, who also narrated Munro's last story collection, HATESHIP, FRIENDSHIP, COURTSHIP, LOVESHIP, MARRIAGE, works successfully in a narrow band of vocals and tones, grasping that these are stories of voice and of distance, in which motive and outcome often remain mysterious, and in which evenness of delivery is part of the drama of the telling. D.A.W. © AudioFile 2005, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine

From Booklist
*Starred Review* The CIP subject heading assigned to this collection of stories is "Women--Fiction." Accurate, yes, and helpful to librarians, of course, but at the same time so reductive, for although Canadian Munro does indeed write about women, her sheer perception and eloquence make her one of the foremost contemporary practitioners of the short story in English. And her status only gains more secure footing with the appearance of these eight new pieces. Munro's stories range "long"--that is, in the 30- to 40-page category. Their planned cohesion and intended restriction of focus actually mean that Munro has invented her own "genre" of short fiction: not undeveloped novels or even unfledged novellas but, rather, true short stories offering a widening and deepening of exploration that shorter pages don't allow. The title story ranks among Munro's best: a showcase of her own approach to "Women--Fiction." A young woman is encouraged by a neighbor to leave her husband, whom she believes is causing her mental distress, but upon discovering that running away really means just being lost, she returns home. And a cycle of three stories featuring the same character at three important junctures in her life is faultless in its clear-cut delineation of the arc of love, loss, and disconnection the woman's family relations have come to represent. Munro is remarkable for the ease and completeness with which she brings the world of a character into the frame, and her characteristic and greatly effective looping through time--not just connecting present and past but also indicating the future--is haunting. All this in a lovely, precise style. Brad Hooper
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

ANNOTATION

Never having been in serious trouble before, a seventeen-year-old boy thinks running away from home is the only solution when everything goes wrong in one evening.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

"In Alice Munro's new collection, we find stories about women of all ages and circumstances, their lives made palpable by the subtlety and empathy of this incomparable writer." 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 in a single moment of stunning insight the limits and lies of that mysterious emotion. Three stories 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.

SYNOPSIS

In Alice Munro’s superb new collection, we find stories about women of all ages and circumstances, their lives made palpable by the subtlety and empathy of this incomparable writer.
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 in a single moment of stunning insight the limits and lies of that mysterious emotion. Three stories 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 a friend and her husband-to-be in lifelong pursuit of what such a gift really means, and who really has it.
Throughout this compelling collection, Alice Munro’s understanding of the people about whom she writes makes them as vivid as our own neighbors. Here are the infinite betrayals and surprises of love–between men and women, between friends, between parents and children–that are the stuff of all our lives. It is Alice Munro’s special gift to make these stories as vivid and real as our own.

Alice Munro grew up in Wingham, Ontario, and attended the University of Western Ontario. Shehas published ten previous collections of stories–Dance of the Happy Shades; Something I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You; The Beggar Maid; The Moons of Jupiter; The Progress of Love; Friend of My Youth; Open Secrets; her Selected Stories; The Love of a Good Woman; and Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage --as well as a novel, Lives of Girls and Women. During her distinguished career she has been the recipient of many awards and prizes, including three of Canada’s Governor General’s Literary Awards and its Giller Prize; the Rea Award for Short Fiction; the Lannan Literary Award; England’s W. H. Smith Award; and the United States’ National Book Critics Circle Award. Her stories have appeared in The New Yorker, the Atlantic Monthly, The Paris Review, and other publications, and her collections have been translated into thirteen languages.
Alice Munro and her husband divide their time between Clinton, Ontario, near Lake Huron, and Comox, British Columbia.

Alice Munro’s Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage; The Love of a Good Woman; Selected Stories; Open Secrets; The Progress of Love; and Lives of Girls and Women are available in Vintage paperback.

FROM THE CRITICS

Carolyn See - The Washington Post

Here are eight wonderful stories -- no, seven great stories and one good one. All seem at first to be about women, but they're about being human -- how that condition cradles us, limits us. Most of them begin in the relatively obscure past and proceed slowly and carefully into what we might call the present. Because of this stately movement through time, many of them are about the inevitable loss of everything we think we have when we are young. Because even as we live this exact moment, it's gone; we can't get it back.

Maria Fish - USA Today

Runaway, which just won the Giller Prize, Canada's biggest literary award for fiction, may very well be the synthesizing work of one of literature's keenest investigators into the human soul. It will, in any case, reach far beyond its time.

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. Agent, William Morris. 100,000 first printing. (Nov. 14) Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

Munro's new story collection will delight fans and convert those who have never before read her work. Her spare style belies the psychological depth of the stories, which feature characters running away from someone or something (often representative of the past) or telling a lie by commission or omission (another form of running away). After opening with a vignette, Munro reveals what has led to or what flows from that moment. The protagonists look for, find, and lose love. Three stories trace Juliet's life from meeting her husband to separating from her adult daughter. "Trepasses" has a creepy beginning (Is Delphine really a family member?), which contributes to the impact of the ending. "Powers," a novella in four sections, begins with Nancy's diary, which is as funny as the story "How I Met My Husband." But the tone changes: at the end, an aged Nancy realizes that she cannot, even by psychic power, run away from or remake the past. Recommended for all libraries. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 7/04.] Elaine Bender, El Camino Coll., Torrance, CA Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

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