Runaway by Alice Munro
CBC Books | Posted: February 7, 2017 4:16 PM | Last Updated: May 14
A short story collection about love and betrayal
The incomparable Alice Munro's bestselling and rapturously acclaimed Runaway is a book of extraordinary stories about love and its infinite betrayals and surprises.
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 neighbours. It is her miraculous gift to make these stories as real and unforgettable as our own. (From Penguin Canada)
Runaway won the Giller Prize in 2004.
Literary legend Alice Munro died on May 13, 2024 at the age of 92. The Canadian writer is revered worldwide as a master of the short story, with 14 acclaimed collections and a Nobel Prize — the 13th woman and second Canadian, after Saul Bellows, to ever receive that honour.
Munro's work has won two Scotiabank Giller Prizes, three Governor General's Literary Awards and the Man Booker International Prize. Her first book, Dance of the Happy Shades, was released in 1968, and she continued to write stories, often contributing to The New Yorker, until retiring in 2013. In books like Lives of Girls and Women, The Love of a Good Woman and Runaway, Munro captured the inner lives of men and women in rural Canada. Her work is inspired by her own upbringing in Wingham, Ont.
From the book
For five years Robin had been doing this. One play every summer. It had started when she was living in Stratford, training to be a nurse. She went with a fellow student who had a couple of free tickets from her aunt, who worked on costumes. The girl who had the tickets was bored sick — it was King Lear — so Robin had kept quiet about how she felt. She could not have expressed it anyway — she would rather have gone away from the theater alone, and not had to talk to anybody for at least twenty-four hours. Her mind was made up then to come back. And to come by herself.
From Runaway by Alice Munro ©2004. Published by Penguin Canada.
Author interviews
More about this book
Julieta, a film directed by Pedro Almodóvar, is adapted from three stories in Runaway.