Miles from Nowhere

by Nami Mun Narrated by Ali Ahn

Overview

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, committing petty crime, and, finally, towards something resembling hope.

Editorial Reviews

Alison McCulloch

With the addiction memoir frequently trumping the novel for depths of degradation and despair, where can the fiction writer go with such a story? In her first novel, Mun…takes a spare, unsentimental path…Joon's is a familiar story, but it's fresh enough here to catch the reader up in wanting an answer to its familiar question: will hope triumph over heroin?
—The New York Times

From the Publisher

"[A] searing debut...[Mun] writes with lovely precision, lending a hallucinatory beauty to the bleak world she has created."
-People (four stars, "Pick of the Week")

"Emotionally upending...Mun relays it all with a jarring honesty that makes the book...impossible to forget."
-Boston Globe

"Gritty, riveting...Filled with soft and lovely descriptive touches...[Mun] zip[s] back and forth between despair and joy, between degradation and exhilaration."
-Chicago Tribune

"Remarkable...As the best novelists do, Mun has taken the essence of her personal experience and reshaped it into something original."
-Seattle Post-Intelligencer

"Heartbreaking...We follow teenage runaway Joon as she navigates dark New York streets, and ultimately finds hope and the will to survive."
-Glamour

"Brilliant and authentic...Those who delight in the raw power of words have a new author to add to our libraries."
-Dallas Morning News

"Graceful, nearly transcendent...One of the most vivid and haunting novels I've read in years."
-San Diego Union- Tribune

"Beautiful...Illuminates a side of American life one is not likely to see elsewhere."
-The Believer

Product Details

BN ID:	2940171167141
Publisher:	Recorded Books, LLC
Publication date:	02/27/2009
Edition description:	Unabridged

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