Runaway

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.