Joon is a young Korean immigrant living in the Bronx of the 1980s. Her parents have crumbled under the weight of her father’s infidelity and mental illness has rendered her mother nearly catatonic. So Joon, at the age of thirteen, decides she’s better off on her own and sets out on a harrowing and sometimes tragic journey, exposing herself to all the pain and difficulty of a life lived on the margins. Joon’s years on the streets take her from a homeless shelter to an escort club, through struggles with addiction, to jobs selling newspapers and cosmetics, committing petty crimes, and, finally, towards something resembling hope.
In raw and beautiful prose, Nami Mun tells the story of a young woman who is at once tough yet vulnerable, world-weary yet naive, faced with insurmountable odds and yet fiercely determined to survive. Honest, inventive and profoundly moving, Miles From Nowhere is a dazzling debut novel that will haunt and inspire.
In raw and beautiful prose, Nami Mun tells the story of a young woman who is at once tough yet vulnerable, world-weary yet naive, faced with insurmountable odds and yet fiercely determined to survive. Honest, inventive and profoundly moving, Miles From Nowhere is a dazzling debut novel that will haunt and inspire.
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Reviews
** 'Miles from Nowhere is a starkly beautiful book, shot through with grace and lit by an off-hand street poetry. Nami Mun takes a cast of junkies and runaways and brings them fiercely and frankly to life. It's a measure of the artistry of the work that even in their grimmest, darkest moments, rather than being repelled by these characters, we want to stay beside them, as if to care for them, or at least to bear witness to their lives
Scams, violence and sudden friendships of street life in New York City.... Nami Mun's debut is suspenseful, funny, painful and poetic
** 'Nami Mun is easily one of the most important new talents in American fiction. The first time I read her work, I thought two things: one, that I knew these characters, people I'd always seen but had never heard from, stories I always knew were there bu