Runaway

Runaway is a signature short-story collection by Alice Munro, the Canadian author and 2013 Nobel Laureate in Literature. First published in English in 2004 as Runaway, the Chinese edition was translated by Li Wenjun and published by Beijing October Arts and Literature Publishing House. The book comprises eight longish stories, mostly set in small towns and rural areas of Canada. In the opening story, Runaway, Carla left her parents at eighteen to run a horse farm with her boyfriend Clark; as life grows increasingly strained, she attempts to leave again but panics on the road and turns back. Three stories—Chance, Soon, and Silence—follow Juliet: leaving academia for a fisherman she met on a train, returning home years later with her daughter, and her daughter's quiet departure as she grows up. Passion, Trespasses, Tricks, and Powers treat, respectively, an afternoon escape by a woman on the verge of engagement with her fiancé's brother, a middle-aged couple's entanglement after a incident of harm, and memories a woman cannot fully reconstruct. Munro seldom writes directly of the thrill of leaving; she is more concerned with the price people pay for turning back halfway, for silence and compromise. These stories are all about love, betrayal, missed chances, and the urge to leave that keeps surfacing in ordinary days. The prose is restrained, the perspective often sliding across decades, and the collection has been called one of the most artistically mature works of her career.