Running Away with Frannie Hardcover - 2006

From the celebrated author of Above the Thunder, a novel about wanderlust and reconciliation with family. Sam meets Frannie in a West Virginia truck stop where she is a waitress on the verge of being fired for flushing a potato down the men's room toilet. Sam has tried five colleges in five different states and has worked an endless variety of jobs, including mail carrier, hospital orderly, factory drudge, and children's birthday party clown. It isn't until he encounters Frannie-who has moved forty-eight times in two years and who believes that her destiny, like that of all the great wanderers in history, will be revealed in the journeys she undertakes-that his restless heart meets its match. However, as this pair of young nomads fall in love, they realize that staying together means, at least for a time, staying in one place. And as Sam tries to link his past with the present, he hopes to disprove the prediction his father, now deceased, once made for him: "The whole world is divided into runners and chasers. You're either running toward, or you're running away. You've spent your whole life trying to escape." About the author: Renee Manfredi is the author of Above the Thunder and the story collection Where Love Leaves Us, which won the Iowa Short Fiction Award. She received an MFA from Indiana University, an NEA fellowship, and was a regional winner of Granta's Best American Novelists Under Forty award. She teaches creative writing at the University of Alaska in Fairbanks.