Runaway

Description

The matchless Munro makes art out of everyday lives in this dazzling new collection. At its centre are three stories connected into one marvellously rich narrative about Juliet - who escapes from teaching at a girls' school and throws herself into a wild and passionate love match. Here are men and women of wildly different times and circumstances, their lives made vividly palpable by the nuance and empathy of Munro's writing. Runaway is about the power and betrayals of love, about lost children, lost chances. There is pain and desolation beneath the surface, like a needle in the heart, which makes these stories more powerful and compelling than anything she has written.

**Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature** Alice Munro was born in 1931 and is the author of thirteen collections of stories, most recently Dear Life, and a novel, Lives of Girls and Women. She has received many awards and prizes, including three of Canada's Governor General's Literary Awards and two Giller Prizes, the Rea Award for the Short Story, the Lannan Literary Award, the WHSmith Book Award in the UK, the National Book Critics Circle Award in the US, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize for The Beggar Maid, and has been awarded the Man Booker International Prize 2009 for her overall contribution to fiction on the world stage, and in 2013 she won the Nobel Prize in Literature. Her stories have appeared in the New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly, Paris Review and other publications, and her collections have been translated into thirteen languages. She lives in Port Hope, Ontario, near lake Ontario in Canada.

Munro is one of my all-time favourite writers. She seems to really see people, like a mind reader who knows what her characters are thinking before they do do, and tells their stories with simplicity and empathy. -- Natasha Lunn * Red * Runaway is so good I don't want to talk about it. Quotation can't do the book justice, and neither can synopsis. The way to do it justice is to read it. Read Munro! Read Munro! -- Jonathan Franzen * New York Times Book Review * Millions of words have been spilt in attempts to tell us exactly what it means to be human. In Runaway, Munro performs that very miracle * The Times * A beautiful, echoing collection, and a demonstration of perfected and unflinching form -- Ali Smith * Scotsman * These stories are breathtaking - they leave you winded with their toughness and brilliance -- Helen Simpson * Guardian *