Author(s): Nami Mun

Fiction.

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.Shortlisted for Orange Award for New Writers 2009.