A major new voice in fiction debuts with the electrifying and heartbreaking story of a teenage runaway on the streets of 1980s New York.

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.

In raw and beautiful prose, Nami Mun delivers the story of a young woman who is at once tough and vulnerable, world-weary and naive, faced with insurmountable odds and yet fiercely determined to survive. In the process, Mun creates one of the most indelible characters in recent fiction and establishes herself as an extraordinarily talented new voice.

Brutally honest, linguistically inventive, and profoundly moving, Miles from Nowhere is a work of fiction that will haunt and inspire a generation of readers.

"Stunning. The visceral power of Nami Mun's Miles from Nowhere sneaks up on you—whatever heartache or humor you find within these pages is embodied in her shimmering prose, distilled to the bone. I found myself reading passages out loud to friends, passages I thought were hallucinatory and funny, only to find myself choking back real tears."

—Nick Flynn, author of Another Bulls**t Night in Suck City

"In this novel set in the 1980's, homeless teen Joon leaves her troubled family to suffer the scams, violence and sudden friendships of street life in New York City. Suspenseful, funny, painful and poetic, Nami Mun's debut shows a talent for close observation and a prose which fills the grit of street life with flashes of gold."

—Janet Fitch, author of White Oleander and Paint It Black

"Miles from Nowhere is a starkly beautiful book, shot through with grace and lit by an off-hand street poetry. Nami Mun takes a cast of junkies and runaways, pimps and panhandlers and brings them fiercely and frankly to life. It's a measure of the artistry of the work that even in their grimmest, darkest moments, rather than being repelled by these characters, we want to stay beside them, as if to care for them, or at least to bear witness to their lives."

Peter Ho Davies, author of The Welsh Girl

"Nami Mun is easily one of the most important new talents in American fiction. The first time I read her work, I thought two things: one, that I knew these characters, people I'd always seen but had never heard from, stories I always knew were there but that until now hadn't been told. And two: that I was in the presence of one of our next great writers.

American fiction is a little larger in a way that really matters, now that she's here."

—Alexander Chee, author of Edinburgh