Books with title Runaway Ralph

"MAY IS GOING FROM STRENGTH TO STRENGTH... A WONDERFUL EXHIBITION OF JUST HOW GOOD MAY CAN BE." --The Daily Mail "Five of us had run away that fateful night just over a month before. Only three of us would be going home. And nothing, nothing would ever be the same again."Glasgow, 1965. Headstrong teenager Jack Mackay has just one destination on his mind--London--and successfully convinces his four friends, and fellow bandmates, to join him in abandoning their homes to pursue a goal of musical stardom.Glasgow, 2015. Jack Mackay, heavy-hearted sixty-seven-year-old is still haunted by what might have been. His recollections of the terrible events that befell him and his friends some fifty years earlier, and how he did not act when it mattered most is a memory he has tried to escape his entire adult life.London, 2015. A man lies dead in a one-room flat. His killer looks on, remorseless. What started with five teenagers following a dream five decades before has been transformed over the intervening decades into a waking nightmare that might just consume them all.

In 1936 Oakland, California fifteen-year-old Ernest Ballard is part of the burgeoning middle-class families in the United States and has a firm black and white grasp of what he thinks is right. When Ernest’s mother, Millie, is mugged on the way home after work, he blames his Father, Thomas, for not providing for the family and seeks him out. He attacks his father. When the dust clears, witness to the fight puts Ernest on an outbound freight to escape murder charges. Ernest agrees to go. What else can he do but runaway? Ernest encounters a mentor, revivalists, thieves, and communists. Runaway is a coming of age story of lies, tragedy, murder, redemption and hope.

"The rousing notes of the bugle and the laughter and shouting increased the feeling of rebellion within Ralph. As the last strains of the bugle call hovered in the clear mountain air, Ralph made up his mind. He knew now what he was going to do. He was going to run away.Fed up with his timid mother and uncle and his squirmy little cousins, Ralph hops onto his toy motorcycle and zooms down the road to summer camp. It turns out camp is not all peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and fun. A strict watchdog, a mouse-hungry cat, and a troubled boy named Garf lead Ralph on some fur-raising escapades. Perhaps home isn't such a bad place to be, if only Ralph can find a way to get there again.

Florian feels like he’s losing everything. His soccer camp, which his parents can’t pay for. His chance to flirt with his secret crush at camp. His parents’ attention. But most of all, his big sister Sarah, who has cancer. Florian is sick of everyone acting like everything is fine when they all know that Sarah isn’t getting any better. Being around my family is extremely hazardous to my health. So Florian makes a split decision: instead of celebrating his sister’s depressing eighteenth birthday at the hospital, he’s going to soccer camp. He takes off from the hospital, packs his bags, raids his parents’ secret stash of cash, and forges a permission letter for his coach. And he goes. But amidst the partying, the girls, the fun, there are some things Florian can’t leave behind him, no matter how hard he tries. When his parents don’t call him, he has to wonder if they miss him at all—or if maybe they have bigger things to worry about. . . .

"It's a cold, hard, cruel fact that my mother loved heroin more than she loved me."Holly is in her fifth foster home in two years and she's had enough. She's run away before and always been caught quickly. But she's older and wiser now--she's twelve--and this time she gets away clean.Through tough and tender and angry and funny journal entries, Holly spills out her story. We travel with her across the country--hopping trains, scamming food, sleeping in parks or homeless encampments. And we also travel with her across the gaping holes in her heart--as she finally comes to terms with her mother's addiction and death. Runaway is a remarkably uplifting portrait of a girl still young and stubborn and naive enough to hold out hope for finding a better place in the world, and within herself, to be.

The incomparable Alice Munro's bestselling and rapturously acclaimed Runaway is a book of extraordinary stories about love and its infinite betrayals and surprises. In Munro's hands, the people she writes about—women of all ages and circumstances, and their friends, lovers, parents, and children—become as vivid as our own neighbours. It is her miraculous gift to make these stories as real and unforgettable as our own.