Runaway

Acclaim for Alice Munro’s
    RUNAWAY
    “Munro is routinely called one of the finest living writers. You can turn to any of the eight stories in
Runaway
and see why.”
    —
Time
    “No one working today can write more convincingly about ‘the progress of love’ than Alice Munro. . . . She stands as one of the living colossi of the modern short story, and her Chekhovian realism, her keen psychological insight, her instinctive feel for the emotional arithmetic of domestic life have indelibly stamped contemporary writing.”
    —
The New York Times
    “Perfect. . . . Feels like a compressed collection of novels, so rich and deep and complete are the lives Munro evokes in these pages.”
    —
Chicago Tribune
    “A sensitive and deeply insightful writer, Munro renders hauntingly realistic characters with an unflinching eye.”
    —
Elle
Magazine Readers’ Prize
    “Munro is wise in the ways of human emotion, and her stories are so rich . . . that even a tale of less than fifty pages feels as rounded as a novel.”
    —
People
Magazine Critics Choice
    “Filled with small masterpieces illuminating real life. . . . Profound in important ways.”
    —
Seattle Post-Intelligencer
    “
Runaway
is so good that I don’t want to talk about it here. Quotation can’t do the book justice, and neither can synopsis. The way to do it justice is to read it. . . . Which leaves me with the simple instruction that I began with: Read Munro! Read Munro!”
    —Jonathan Franzen,
The New York Times Book Review
    “[Munro is] one of the greats of the twentieth century.”
    —
Newsday
    “Radiant. . . . Achingly wise. . . . The stories are funny, grand, and tragic. They settle around the reader for hours afterward, like weather.”
    —
Houston Chronicle
    “Sparkling. . . . Beautifully drawn. . . . Munro excels at capturing the inner life. . . . Any new compendium of Munro’s wise, delicate, and insightful tales is a treat.”
    —
Entertainment Weekly
    “Simply breathtaking.” —
Fort Worth Star-Telegram
    “It’s not common to find stories that hurt like a wound, that make you gasp. Not, that is, unless you read Alice Munro . . . . These stories offer no bromides, no feel-good aphorisms about growing stronger through adversity. They do, however, offer one of literature’s great gifts: making even unbearable things a little easier to bear.”
    —
The Baltimore Sun
    “Captivating. . . . Munro does what most writers dream of doing and succeeds at it, page after page, story after story, collection after collection.”
    —
The Oregonian
    “Quintessential Munro at top form.” —
Quill & Quire
    “Beautifully written and startlingly real. . . . Her characters are so real that they walk off the page. I had to close the book after each story, letting the experience sink in.”
    —Ashley Simpson Shires,
Rocky Mountain News
    “Munro is a master stylist. . . . Pound for pound, her stories are richer than most. They reverberate the way a good novel can.”
    —
The Plain Dealer
    “Dazzling. . . . Astonishing. . . . Munro hasn’t mellowed with maturity. She only grows sharper with time.”
    —Francine Prose,
More
    “Goosebumpingly unforgettable.”
    —
The New York Observer
    “Coolly observed human mysteries. One can feel the suspense. . . . The thrilling unexpectedness of real life, which Munro rightly insists on, will in her hands keep a reader glued.”
    —Lorrie Moore,
The Atlantic Monthly
    “Munro, that rare talent equally adept at the language arts, character development and plot, could write about nothing but weeds or wallpaper and still leave readers deeply satisfied.”
    —
Minneapolis Star Tribune
    “In Alice Munro’s hands, the smallest moments contain the central truths of a lifetime.”
    —
Maclean’s
    “From a markedly finite number of essential components, Munro rather miraculously spins out countless permutations of desire and despair, attenuated hopes and cloudbursts of epiphany. . . . Every one of these women is different, and that is the wonder of Alice Munro.”
    —
The Village Voice

RUNAWAY

    Carla heard the car coming before it topped the little rise in the road that around here they called a hill. It ’s her, she thought. Mrs. Jamieson—Sylvia—home from her holiday in Greece. From the barn door—but far enough inside that she could not readily be seen—she watched the road Mrs. Jamieson would have to drive by on, her place being half a mile farther along the road than Clark and Carla’s.
    If