BookBrowse Reviews Runaway by Alice Munro

Short stories about women of all ages and circumstances - stories as vivid

From the book jacket: In Alice Munro’s superb new collection, we find stories about women of all ages and circumstances, their lives made palpable by the subtlety and empathy of this incomparable writer.  Throughout this compelling collection, her understanding of the people about whom she writes makes them as vivid as our own neighbors. Here are the infinite betrayals and surprises of love–between men and women, between friends, between parents and children–that are the stuff of all our lives. It is Alice Munro’s special gift to make these stories as vivid and real as our own.

Comment: This is Munro's 12th book, following Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage (2001).  It contains eight short stories (several of which have appeared elsewhere - in the New Yorker I believe) that confront the facts of aging, changing, remembering, regretting and, of course, one's own mortality.  Three of the stories, "Chance", "Soon" and "Silence", find Juliet Henderson, a student and sometimes classical culture teacher, at three different stages of her life; the remaining stories stand alone.

Booklist says the "subject heading assigned to this collection of stories is "Women--Fiction." Accurate, yes, and helpful to librarians, of course, but at the same time so reductive, for although Canadian Munro does indeed write about women, her sheer perception and eloquence make her one of the foremost contemporary practitioners of the short story in English."

Publishers Weekly says that "nothing is new in Munro's latest collection, which is to say that the author continues to perfect her virtuosic formula"; while Library Journal believes "Munro's new story collection will delight fans and convert those who have never before read her work".

This review first ran in the November 30, 2005 issue of BookBrowse Recommends.