The Best Books of the 21st Century, from the New York Times
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Sign up todayRunaway
Stories
Narrator
Kymberly Dakin
This audiobook uses AI narration.
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Length
10 hours 58 minutes
Language
English
The incomparable Alice Munro’s bestselling and rapturously acclaimed Runaway is a book of extraordinary stories about women of all ages and circumstances—and about love and its infinite betrayals and surprises.
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, in a single moment of insight, the limits and lies of passion.
Three stories concern a woman named Juliet—in the first, she escapes from teaching at a girls’ school into a wild love affair; in the second, she returns with her child to the home of her parents, whose marriage she finally begins to examine; and in the last, her vanished child turns up caught in the grip of a religious cult.
In these and other stories, Alice Munro’s understanding of the people about whom she writes makes their lives as real as our own.
Alice Munro (1931–2024) was the author of eleven collections of stories and two volumes of selected stories, as well as a novel. She won the 2013 Nobel Prize in Literature, as well as many other awards and prizes, including three of Canada’s Governor General’s Literary Awards, two Giller Prizes, the Man Booker International Prize, the Lannan Literary Award, W. H. Smith Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and more. Her stories have appeared in the New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly, Paris Review, and other publications. She grew up in Wingham, Ontario, and attended the University of Western Ontario.
Kymberly Dakin is a professional actress with over twenty years’ experience and has been a featured performer both on Broadway and in national tours. Kym has also played roles on The Guiding Light, One Life to Live, and All My Children, and has appeared on PAX-TV’s It’s a Miracle and on PBS’ Math Monsters.
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Reviews
“Alice Munro has a strong claim to being the best fiction writer now working in North America…Runaway is a marvel.”
“Munro’s new story collection will delight fans and convert those who have never before read her work.”
“Retrospect and resolution, neither fully comprehended nor ultimately satisfying: such are the territories the masterful Munro explores in her tenth collection…In a word: magnificent.”
“The great Alice Munro proves again why short-story writers bow down to her.”
“Runaway may very well be the synthesizing work of one of literature’s keenest investigators into the human soul.”
“Each of the stories in Runaway contains enough lived life to fill a typical novel…Her women are heroic. They endure in the mind of the reader.”
“A beautiful new work.”
“Munro’s stories are…global, bighearted, and warm…One never knows quite where a Munro story will end, only that it will leave an incandescent trail of psychological insight.”
“Dakin…works successfully in a narrow band of vocals and tones, grasping that these are stories of voice and of distance.”
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