Runaway: Stories

A powerful book of short stories exploring the complication of running away, and the even greater complication of returning home, only to find it is not the home it once was - all with exclusively female protagonists, subverting the archetype of the woman as anchor, the woman as the home, the woman who is trapped by a domestic life.

It would be a difficult task to even begin to touch here what Munro accomplishes - each story is in itself a novel, with so much to be unpacked. Each one left me feeling like I had been punched in the gut.

This review from The Guardian sums it up as well as I ever could:
“Munro's stories have always felt exceptionally capacious; they have the scope of novels, though without any awkward sense of speeding up or boiling down... It's almost impossible to describe their unforced exactness, their unrushed economy.”

One of my best friends bought this book for me and, as you know, when someone buys you a book, it's kind of a recommendation, so I began. Let me start off by saying that February was a very wet and windy month. I had some quiet time at home for a couple of nights when the entire family had flu, which I somehow managed to avoid, so I took advantage of the quiet time, with the wind howling and the rain battering the windows. And that's when I got into this book. There was something quite magical about it, and I was pleasantly surprised to find myself drawn right in to the characters and their relationships.

The stories all have in common the idea of the passage of time and looking back at stories of love and broken relationships with hindsight. I think I'm at the right age for that kind of story as I find myself looking back at my own timeline often and wondering how my kids will look back on the the here-and-now when they're my age.

So, thank you for a great book Maria Cristina!

I'd heard how good Alice Munro is and how she's the best living short story writer but as a guy, the domestic detail themes were putting me off, a little.
If you are male and think this writer isn't for you, you'd be wrong. If you are a feeling human being you'll get something from them. She has a way of letting the stories resonate with each other, so that they move deeper feelings like really good poetry, yet on the surface there is nothing flashy, just “ordinary” lives, being lived out.
Some of the stories are connected with the same characters and some are separate, but I come away with the feeling of a unified force.