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  • Runaway

  • Stories
  • Written by: Alice Munro
  • Narrated by: Kymberly Dakin
  • Length: 10 hrs and 58 mins
  • 3.7 out of 5 stars (231 ratings)

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Runaway

Written by: Alice Munro
Narrated by: Kymberly Dakin
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Publisher's Summary

The stories in this collection are about women of all ages and circumstances. The runaway of the title story is a young woman who is incapable of leaving her husband. In another, a country girl emerging into the larger world via a job in a resort hotel discovers in a single moment of insight the limits and lies of passion.

Three stories concern the same woman - in the first, she escapes from teaching at a girls' school into a wild love affair; in the second, she returns with her child to the home of her parents, whose marriage she finally begins to examine; and in the last, her vanished child turns up caught in the grip of a religious cult.

In these and other stories, Alice Munro's understanding of the people about whom she writes makes their lives as real as our own.

©2004 Alice Munro (P)2008 BBC Audiobooks America

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What listeners say about Runaway

Average Customer Ratings
Overall
  • 3.5 out of 5 stars
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  • Overall
    5 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    4 out of 5 stars
  • Story
    5 out of 5 stars

Great stories, one quibble on good narration

Hard to pick a favourite volume of Munro stories but this one is up there. I wish Audible.ca would offer many more. I have all her collections in hard copy and also enjoy hearing them read. All these are, as usual, excellent. Especially good to have a trilogy of them in this collection. Several show Munro’s excellent handling of time over one life. Narration is fine, very clear, good with the different voices, maybe a little warm and dramatic in spots for Munro’s sensibility. One quibble: If Audible is going to use American narrators, I wish they would check on pronunciation of Canadian place names; it just grates a little when they’re mispronounced. #Audible1.

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16 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    3 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    1 out of 5 stars
  • Story
    3 out of 5 stars

Interesting writing. Lackluster narration.

Some of the storylines were very interesting and the author could paint a picture with such detail!
As an audiobook though it was confusing not knowing when one story had finished and another had started
I did not enjoy the narration so I could not finish

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10 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    4 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    3 out of 5 stars
  • Story
    4 out of 5 stars

Nostalgic and Quaint

I picked up this read because I enjoyed some of her works in high school and was curious if I would still. The stories were good and I enjoyed the vignette style, particularly "tricks" and "powers." The narrator was good, maybe a bit mundane but chalk it up to Munro's prose. The part I struggled with was that Audible's chapter delineation didn't line up with the short stories, and it wasn't clear where each story started and ended. The narrator did state the story name before she started, but it was run in with the story before and easy to miss.

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5 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    5 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    5 out of 5 stars
  • Story
    5 out of 5 stars

Excellent

I love the carefully crafted characters and lives that this author consistently weaves into such captivating reads. Sometimes refecting a close up tidbit of myself, sometimes a totally different but believable world. I especially appreciate not bring able to guess or predict what will happen in any of them. I'm in awe of her storytelling.

The reader did a perfect job telling these as well, capturing the nuance of voice and mood the whole way through.

A minor downside was the chapter beginning and ending misalignment and lack of titles in this download.

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3 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    5 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    5 out of 5 stars
  • Story
    5 out of 5 stars
  • RS
  • 2020-05-12

loved it!

Stories were great and narrator did a good job. Overall I really enjoyed the book.

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3 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    5 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    4 out of 5 stars
  • Story
    5 out of 5 stars

Runaway

Enjoyable. However I found the breaks for chapters very odd. They did not follow the stories. A simple word and the whole story changed. It wasn’t until looking back that I realized those were the chapter names.

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1 person found this helpful

  • Overall
    1 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    1 out of 5 stars

not a good audible

reading is too fast and is totally not the right tone for what I expect from this author.

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1 person found this helpful

  • Overall
    2 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    3 out of 5 stars
  • Story
    1 out of 5 stars

Weird layout for an audiobook

This had a very strange layout. There are 9 chapters in the audiobook but only 8 stories. Each story starts in the middle of a chapter and if you aren't paying rapt attention then you will miss the pause and the title of the next story. Suddenly you will wonder if this is part of the same story or not but you have no way to check because the chapters are also unlabeled. literally are called "Chapter 1", "Chapter 2" etc.

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  • Overall
    3 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    1 out of 5 stars
  • Story
    5 out of 5 stars

Alice Munro is an astute observer of bleak lives

The stories are brilliant - in a depressing way. This narrator however is not up to the task…a robotic, grating voice makes it a slog through to the end.

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  • Overall
    4 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    4 out of 5 stars
  • Story
    4 out of 5 stars

It was an interesting read

I enjoyed the stories. It took me a few minutes to figure out when the stories were tied together as some were and then some weren’t. I enjoyed her description of the places she had visited however not the narrator’s mispronunciations of the names.

It was a pleasant book to listen too.

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