THIS TITLE WON THE 2004 GILLER PRIZE

One of the 10 best books of 2004 according to The New York Times
“Her 11th collection of short stories about people, often women living in rural Ontario, whose vivid, unremarkable lives are rendered with almost Tolstoyan resonance.”

“Chance encounters and the primal urge to flee—relationships, the past—connect the women in these eight stories.”

Joel Topcik (The New York Times)

“But who is Alice Munro? She is the remote provider of intensely pleasurable private experiences. And since I'm not interested in reviewing her new book's marketing campaign or in being entertainingly snarky at her expense, and since I'm reluctant to talk about the concrete meaning of her new work, because this is difficult to do without revealing too much plot, I'm probably better off just serving up a nice quote for Alfred A. Knopf to pull—‘Munro has a strong claim to being the best fiction writer now working in North America. Runaway is a marvel’—and suggesting to the Book Review's editors that they run the biggest possible photograph of Munro in the most prominent of places, plus a few smaller photos of mildly prurient interest (her kitchen? her children?) and maybe a quote from one of her rare interviews—‘Because there is this kind of exhaustion and bewilderment when you look at your work. (...) All you really have left is the thing you're working on now. And so you're much more thinly clothed. You're like somebody out in a little shirt or something, which is just the work you're doing now and the strange identification with everything you've done before. And this probably is why I don't take any public role as a writer. Because I can't see myself doing that except as a gigantic fraud’—and just leave it at that.”

“Besides Runaway, the most compelling contemporary fiction I've read in recent months has been Wallace's stories in Oblivion and a stunner of a collection by the British writer Helen Simpson. Simpson's book, a series of comic shrieks on the subject of modern motherhood, was published originally as Hey Yeah Right Get a Life;mdash;a title you would think needed no improvement. But the book's American packagers set to work improving it, and what did they come up with? Getting a Life.”

“Basically, Runaway is so good that I don't want to talk about it here. Quotation can't do the book justice, and neither can synopsis. The way to do it justice is to read it.”

Jonathan Franzen (The New York Times)
author of The Corrections