Audiobooks by Alice Munro

The incomparable Alice Munro’s bestselling and rapturously acclaimed Runaway is a book of extraordinary stories about women of all ages and circumstances—and about love and its infinite betrayals and surprises. The runaway of the title story is a young woman who is incapable of leaving her husband. In “Passion,” 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 a woman named Juliet—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. “Dakin, who also narrated Munro’s last story collection, Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage, works successfully in a narrow band of vocals and tones, grasping that these are stories of voice and of distance, in which motive and outcome often remain mysterious, and in which evenness of delivery is part of the drama of the telling.”--AudioFile

Alice Munro (Author), Kymberly Dakin (Narrator)

Audiobook

Dear Life

Moments of change, chance encounters, twists of fate that create a new way of thinking or being: the stories in Dear Life build to form a radiant, indelible portrait of just how dangerous and strange ordinary life can be. The collection includes four powerful pieces, 'Autobiographical in Feeling', set during the time of Munro's own childhood, in the area where she grew up.

Alice Munro (Author), Liza Ross, Multiple Narrators, Robert Slade (Narrator)

Audiobook

Dear Life

Alice Munro's peerless ability to give us the essence of a life in often brief but always spacious and timeless stories is once again everywhere apparent in this brilliant new collection. In story after story, she illumines the moment a life is forever altered by a chance encounter or an action not taken, or by a simple twist of fate that turns a person out of his or her accustomed path and into a new way of being or thinking. A poet, finding herself in alien territory at her first literary party, is rescued by a seasoned newspaper columnist, and is soon hurtling across the continent, young child in tow, toward a hoped-for but completely unplanned meeting. A young soldier, returning to his fiancée from the Second World War, steps off the train before his stop and onto the farm of another woman, beginning a life on the move. A wealthy young woman having an affair with the married lawyer hired by her father to handle his estate comes up with a surprising way to deal with the blackmailer who finds them out. While most of these stories take place in Munro's home territory-the small Canadian towns around Lake Huron-the characters sometimes venture to the cities, and the audiobook ends with four pieces set in the area where she grew up, and in the time of her own childhood: stories "autobiographical in feeling, though not, sometimes, entirely so in fact." A girl who can't sleep imagines night after wakeful night that she kills her beloved younger sister. A mother snatches up her child and runs for dear life when a crazy woman comes into her yard. Suffused with Munro's clarity of vision and her unparalleled gift for storytelling, these tales about departures and beginnings, accidents and dangers, and outgoings and homecomings both imagined and real, paint a radiant, indelible portrait of how strange, perilous, and extraordinary ordinary life can be.

Alice Munro (Author), Arthur Morey, Kimberly Farr (Narrator)

Audiobook

Too Much Happiness: Stories

Ten superb new stories by one of our most beloved and admired writers—the winner of the 2009 Man Booker International Prize. In the first story a young wife and mother receives release from the unbearable pain of losing her three children from a most surprising source. In another, a young woman, in the aftermath of an unusual and humiliating seduction, reacts in a clever if less-than-admirable fashion. Other stories uncover the “deep-holes” in a marriage, the unsuspected cruelty of children, and how a boy’s disfigured face provides both the good things in his life and the bad. And in the long title story, we accompany Sophia Kovalevsky—a late-nineteenth-century Russian émigré and mathematician—on a winter journey that takes her from the Riviera, where she visits her lover, to Paris, Germany, and, Denmark, where she has a fateful meeting with a local doctor, and finally to Sweden, where she teaches at the only university in Europe willing to employ a female mathematician. With clarity and ease, Alice Munro once again renders complex, difficult events and emotions into stories that shed light on the unpredictable ways in which men and women accommodate and often transcend what happens in their lives. Too Much Happiness is a compelling, provocative—even daring—collection. From the Hardcover edition.

Alice Munro (Author), Arthur Morey, Kimberly Farr (Narrator)

Audiobook

The View from Castle Rock

In stories that are more personal than any that she has written before, Alice Munro pieces her family history into gloriously imagined fiction.A young boy is taken to Edinburgh Castle Rock, where his father assures him that on a clear day he can see America, and he catches a glimpse of his father's dream. In stories that follow, as the dream becomes a reality, two sisters-in-law experience very different kinds of passion on the long voyage to the New World. Other stories take place in more familiar Munro territory, the towns and countryside around Lake Huron, where the past shows through the present like the traces of a glacier on the landscape, and strong emotions stir just beneath the surface of ordinary comings and goings.Evocative, gripping, sexy, unexpected these stories reflect a depth and richness of experience. The View from Castle Rock is a brilliant achievement from one of the finest writers of our time.

Alice Munro (Author), Kimberly Farr (Narrator)

Audiobook

The View from Castle Rock

In stories that are more personal than any that she has written before, Alice Munro pieces her family history into gloriously imagined fiction. A young boy is taken to Edinburgh Castle Rock, where his father assures him that on a clear day he can see America, and he catches a glimpse of his father's dream. In stories that follow, as the dream becomes a reality, two sisters-in-law experience very different kinds of passion on the long voyage to the New World. Other stories take place in more familiar Munro territory, the towns and countryside around Lake Huron, where the past shows through the present like the traces of a glacier on the landscape, and strong emotions stir just beneath the surface of ordinary comings and goings. Evocative, gripping, sexy, unexpected–these stories reflect a depth and richness of experience. The View from Castle Rock is a brilliant achievement from one of the finest writers of our time.

Alice Munro (Author), Kimberly Farr (Narrator)

Audiobook