Runaway by Alice Munro

Runaway, a collection of stories by Alice Munro, won the Giller Prize for 2004, which was reason enough for me to pick it up when I saw it in the library's audiobook section. The stories are:

• Runaway - Carla seems trapped in a bad relationship. Can she escape and where does she belong?
  
• Chance - Juliet meets a stranger on a train.
  
• Soon - Juliet returns East to visit her parents with her child.
  
• Silence - Juliet is estranged from her adult child.
  
• Passion - Grace meets her fiance's older brother and her life takes an turn that's not ordinary but not surprising.
  
• Trespasses - 10-year old Lauren doesn't seem to have many friends, except for the hotel cleaning lady.
  
• Tricks - Robin's life reaches a turning point. We check in 30 later to see how it turned out.
  
• Powers - Nancy's friend Tessa is an unusual girl. We check in 40 years later to see how she turned out.

So, there are a few common themes:

• All of the stories have to do with a woman's (or girl's) relationships.
• In addition to "Runaway", some other stories have that theme; thus it's a good name for the collection.
• In a few (the Juliet trilogy, Robin, and Grace) we come back later to see how things turned out.

All-in-all, it's not bad. I thought the Juliet sections were the least interesting, and she got three stories of the eight. In it, she encounters a Christian pastor who seems so incompetent that Munro's apparent stereotype made me upset with her. But it turned out that he may have had a reason for acting as he did, and as her saga ends with an interesting point on parenting, the reader is left to wonder if the pastor was right after all.

If I had to choose a favourite, it might be either Trespasses or Tricks.

As it's a book about women and their relationships, it would, of course, be most interesting to someone who is, well, interested in that kind of thing. Still, it was less a "Romance Novel" than was A Student of Weather, which I selected because it was a Giller Prize finalist in 2000.

I give Runaway 3 1/2 stars out of 5.