Runaway

The collection's spine is Juliet, a young classics teacher Munro follows across three stories, Chance, Soon, and Silence, published out of chronological order so the reader has to reassemble her life the way memory actually works, backward and in fragments rather than in sequence. Chance has Juliet meet Eric on a train and follow him, on impulse, to the fishing village where he lives with his dying wife; Soon finds her years later, an infant daughter in tow, visiting her aging parents and refusing, in a small domestic scene that costs her more than she expects, to offer her ailing mother the religious comfort the older woman is openly asking for.

Silence completes the sequence two decades on: Juliet's adult daughter Penelope has cut off all contact, vanishing into what Juliet eventually learns is a spiritual retreat, and Munro refuses to supply the scene of rupture itself, only its long, unexplained aftermath, postcards, secondhand rumors, a mother rehearsing the version of the story she'll tell people who ask. The title story pairs a literal disappearance and return, Carla's pet goat Flora bolts into the woods and later turns up dead, with a marriage Carla lacks the nerve to actually leave despite her older neighbor Sylvia's help, Flora's fate standing in for the escape Carla keeps talking herself out of.

Munro's choice to run the three Juliet stories out of order means a reader meets the estranged mother of Silence before understanding the eager, love-struck young woman of Chance, so every later scene of Juliet's tenderness toward her own mother in Soon has to be read against a future the character in that scene doesn't yet know is coming.

Sylvia drives Carla partway to freedom and then watches her turn back before the bus station, and the goat's disappearance and reappearance, dead, bracket that failed escape almost too neatly, Munro using an animal's fate to say plainly what she won't let Carla's own choices say about why leaving never actually happens.