Miles from Nowhere Mun, Nami

In raw and beautiful prose, debut novelist Mun delivers the story of a young woman who is at once tough and vulnerable, faced with insurmountable odds and yet fiercely determined to survive. In the process, Mun creates one of the most indelible characters in recent fiction.

From the Publisher:
Fleeing her 1980s Bronx family home in the wake of her unfaithful father's abandonment and her mother's mental illness, Korean teen Joon struggles through an adolescence marked by homeless shelters, addiction, and demeaning jobs. A first novel. Reprint.A major voice in fiction debuts with the story of a teenage runaway on the streets of 1980s New York.|| Teenage Joon is a Korean immigrant living in the Bronx of the 1980s. Her parents have crumbled under the weight of her fatherÂ's infidelity; he has left the family, and mental illness has rendered her mother nearly catatonic. So Joon, at the age of thirteen, decides she would be better off on her own, a choice that commences a harrowing and often tragic journey that exposes the painful difficulties of a life lived on the margins. JoonÂ's adolescent years 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 toward something resembling hope.

Annotation:
After running away from her dysfunctional home as a teenager, a Korean-American girl, Joon, becomes a junkie, working by turns as a hooker, an Avon lady, and a thief. Told in fragments and laced with gritty realism, MILES FROM NOWHERE is a jagged but satisfying portrait of a tough, damaged woman trying to find something resembling happiness.

Praise

"[T]he author excels at drawing desperate characters and conveying an urban sense of missed connections." - Megan Doll 12/18/2008

"There is nothing simplistic or sensationalized here as Mun...portrays the dispossessed and the cast-out, reminding us how quickly things can go disastrously wrong, how tough it is to live outside the margins." - Donna Seaman 11/15/2009

"Both foreign and familiar, Mun's characters are staples of every urban landscape - young lives on the margins bearing witness each day to despair, decay, and death. Yet for all their desperation, there is also their dogged struggle to survive even when they know the next sunrise may again bring them everything but hope." - Renee Graham 02/21/2009

"Nami Mun does many things extremely well, and one of those is forcing the reader to feel the bone-chilling cold of having nowhere to go....[She] illuminates a side of American life one is not likely to see elsewhere." - Suzanne Kleid 01/01/2009

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Miles from Nowhere (Paperback)

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