The only novel from bestselling author Alice Munro, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature Catching frogs, grazing knees, singing songs to save England from Hitler - that was childhood for Del Jordan, and now she's impatient for more. More than she can find in the encyclopedias sold by her mother, or in the half-understood innuendos dispensed by best friend Naomi, or in the whispers of boys during Friday night dances. Just like the girls in the movies, she wants to get started on real life. In her only novel, Alice Munro turns her eye to the frustrations, embarrassments, glee and bewilderment of adolescence, and to the brushes with sex, death, violence and birth that shape the lives of girls and women.

This is the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature. The matchless Munro makes art out of everyday lives in this exquisite collection. Here are men and women of wildly different times and circumstances, their lives made vividly palpable by the nuance and empathy of Munro's writing. Runaway is about the power and betrayals of love, about lost children, lost chances. There is pain and desolation beneath the surface, like a needle in the heart, which makes these stories more powerful and compelling than anything she has written before. It is the winner of the Man Booker International Prize 2009.