The Harvard Square Book Circle

The Harvard Square Book Circle, our in-store book club, will discuss Miles from Nowhere, the debut novel by Korean American writer Nami Mun.

Teenage Joon is a Korean immigrant living in the Bronx of the 1980s. Her parents have crumbled under the weight of her father’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. Joon’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.

"Vivid and mournful, Miles From Nowhere follows five agonizing years in the life of Joon, a Korean teenager who slides onto society's jagged edges after her family disintegrates. Hers is an emotionally upending story in which author Nami Mun unflinchingly details the hardships that inflict Joon, as well as the shattered souls who drift in and out of her misspent adolescence.... Mun relays it all with a jarring honesty that makes the book both difficult to read and impossible to forget." —The Boston Globe

“Relayed in a series of sharply delineated, matter-of-fact chapters, Joon’s desperate life and times are shot through with outrageous characters, transient loves and wisecracking dialogue. Brief, balanced and gritty, Nami Mun’s debut shows much promise.”
—The Guardian (UK)