Miles From Nowhere
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- 3,99 €
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- 3,99 €
Beschreibung des Verlags
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Mun's first novel is a 1980s urban odyssey in which Joon-Mee, a 12-year-old Korean-American, leaves her troubled Bronx family for the life of a New York City runaway. The novel follows Joon over six years, as she lives in a homeless shelter, finds work as an underage escort and a streetwalker, succumbs to drug addiction and petty crime, then tries to turn it all around. Along the way we meet a cast of addicts, grifters and homeless people, including Wink, a boisterous but vulnerable young street veteran ("I didn't even know they had boy prostitutes"); Knowledge, a friend who ropes Joon into helping steal her family's Christmas tree; and Benny, a drugged-up orderly and self-destructive love interest. Mun is careful not to lean on the '80s ambience, and Joon's voice, purged of self-pity, sounds clear and strong on every page. Individual scenes, including Joon's first john, her interview with an antagonistic employment counselor and her climactic encounter with a good-hearted former neighbor, are wonderfully written. Unfortunately, the novel's episodic structure prevents Joon's story from building to anything greater than its parts.
