Runaway by
Alice Munro

Eight “sparkling [and] beautifully drawn” (Entertainment Weekly) stories about love and its infinite betrayals and surprises, from Nobel Prize–winning author Alice Munro.

The runaway of the title story is a young woman who 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 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.

A National Bestseller. One of the New York Times’s 100 Best Books of the 21st Century.