Synopses & Reviews
Captivating readers with astounding insights into humanity, Alice Munro delivers some of her finest prose in this stunning collection of short stories. In "Runaway," a neighbor helps a wife escape from her husband; in "Passion," alcoholism disrupts a young woman's first love affair; in "Trespasses," 14-year old Lauren learns a disturbing secret about her birth; and in "Tricks," a woman falls for a stranger and agrees to meet him in the same place the following year. The trilogy Chance, Soon, and Silence depicts a young teacher, Juliet, who meets her lover on a train and then, by terrible chance, visits his home on the day after his wifes funeral. The concluding story, Powers, spans 50 years, several towns, and four characters including Tessa, whose psychic powers take her on the vaudeville circuit.
Synopsis
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.