Sanctuary

For readers of The Road, Parable of the Sower, and The Underground Railroad, a gripping debut about a thirteen-year-old American who must walk three thousand miles home through a world that went dark in an afternoon, and who learns, mile by mile, what his papers are worth.

Some borders are guarded with guns. Others with paperwork.

When a solar storm burns out every circuit on Earth, Miles Jensen is in Costa Rica with his mother, counting the months until they go home. By nightfall the planes are down, the grids are dark, and she is gone.

Eight months later he is the only American in an orphanage that is running out of food. Then a letter arrives, carried three thousand miles by strangers, addressed to a mother who is already dead. His grandparents are alive on their farm in Wisconsin. His sister is alive. Come home. We're waiting.

No planes are flying. No one is coming for him. So Miles begins to walk.

He goes north with Lucía, a sixteen-year-old Nicaraguan girl with an aunt's address and no papers, and Elias, an American who used to launder money for men who are still in business. Some of the danger is plain: hunger, guns, checkpoints. Some of it arrives as a contract, a fee, a clerk who is only doing his job.

A migration story told in reverse, Sanctuary asks what we owe the people walking beside us, and who gets to belong.