The short story is often seen as a form of apprenticeship; a way for writers to practise their craft in a small, safe space. After a while, they should be able to remove the stabilisers and get on with the real business of the novel: the years of research, ever-multiplying plots — and, when it’s all over, the satisfying thunk of 500 hard-bound pages landing on the doormat. In between these Herculean undertakings, they might return to stories, as if enjoying a paddle in the shallows after a cross-Channel swim.

Unusually, Alice Munro has devoted her career to the short story, and when reading her work it is difficult to remember why the novel was ever invented. In this, the Canadian septuagenarian’s tenth collection, each story might be held delicately — to quote one character — “like a teacup in one hand”. But inside are storms, calms and unfathomable depths.

All are concerned with the compulsion to start life afresh. In the title story the spirited Carla elopes with her loner boyfriend Clark in search of a “more authentic” existence, optimistically humming the Beatles song She’s Leaving Home as she places a blunt note to her parents on the kitchen table. But years later, when authenticity has become entrapment, she struggles to re-enact that youthful gesture of abandonment.

In the central three stories, Juliet deserts her love of Greek and her budding academic career for a man she meets in a railway carriage. Impassively, she considers the “putting away” of her “bright treasure”: “A loss you could not contemplate at one time, and now it becomes something you can barely remember.” In time Juliet gains a new treasure, her daughter Penelope. But in Munro’s echo-chamber of a book, Penelope never returns from her stay at a spiritual camp: she, too, has run away. Juliet longs to rewrite her story into one of reunion, full of “undeserved blessings, spontaneous remissions, things of that sort”. She cannot. Like Faulkner, whose preoccupation with rural, small-town life she shares, Munro is aware of the impossibility of ever truly “starting over”.

The themes and settings of Runaway are not new: in a superficial sense, the focus of Munro’s fiction has always been remarkably narrow. Her female protagonists feel the agonising distance between poor, country roots and educated, urban adulthood, the curiously accidental course of relationships, the seductive illusion of escape. But this “narrowness” is anything but weakness: it has given her writing powerful compression and economy, and allows for infinite emotional breadth and depth.

While Munro gives the sense of noticing everything — the telltale “pancake fold of white flesh” slopping over the top of a man’s bathing trunks, the “private queer feeling” of disgust a young girl gets about feet in nylon stockings, or cereal slopping around in milk — she rejects the omniscience of the old-school novelist. As her characters flounder in attempts to guess each other’s stories, she, too, admits the limitations of her fictions. On the last page, as a woman awakes from her dream, the story crumbles behind us “like soot and soft ash”. Epiphanies are offered, but withheld.

Writers are often praised for their “surgical precision”, but these lives are laid open with more clarity and honesty, less coldness and superiority, than that phrase implies. Millions of words have been spilt in attempts to tell us exactly what it means to be human. In eight short stories — a teacup-full — Munro performs that very miracle.

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