Runaway

Eight stories about women making choices, or failing to, and the long shadows those moments cast. Runaway is Munro at the peak of her powers, and the best single volume to show you why she won the Nobel.

Why Start Here

The opening story, “Runaway,” sets the template perfectly: a young woman on the verge of leaving her life behind, a neighbor who may or may not be helping her, and a goat that becomes one of literature’s most haunting symbols. Within twenty pages, Munro has established that her stories operate on multiple time registers at once, the present action and everything that came before and after it.

The collection also contains the linked “Chance,” “Soon,” and “Silence” trilogy, which follows one character across decades of her life. It’s the closest Munro comes to a novel, and it demonstrates that her apparent simplicity is a kind of controlled detonation.

What to Expect

Quiet on the surface, devastating underneath. Munro writes about small lives with the attentiveness of someone who knows they contain everything. Stories end without tying off, she trusts you to sit with the unresolved.