What follows is a review of Nami Mun’s 2008 novel, Miles From Nowhere.

Embarrassingly I had picked this book up from my library on a whim – I liked the cover. They tell you not to judge a book by its cover, but they’re wrong. Covers are important. The cover of Miles From Nowhere is mostly the sky. There is a sense of quiet metropolitan despair emanating from its soft blue tone. I liked it, because it reminded me of something I’d read J.G. Ballard write. Besides this, I never heard of the book before, nor have I heard of the Pushcart Award winning author, Nami Mun.

Once its turn came on my reading pile, I’d read the book in two days. It can’t possibly be read in more sittings than are absolutely necessary, simply because it would become too painful to pick up again. Each chapter, a self-contained story in itself, hurts. Emotionally, and perhaps physically (is there a difference?). I never want to read Miles from Nowhere again, but you should get it now, and read it as soon as you have it in your house. It’s an important book, I feel. It has a significant lesson about humanity to teach. Let it take you to New York of the 1980s. It wasn’t a friendly place for a girl who’d ran away from home. New York of the 80s was the place where they might fall in with a bad crowd, resort to selling their body and doing drugs to get by. It is a place of suffering and of numbing isolation, and not a place for anyone to grow up on their own.

We meet the protagonist, Joon, just before she and her best friend, Knowledge, run away from their orphanage. We accompany Joon through her turbulent youth. The book’s narrative covers the girl’s early teens and early twenties. Her first love. Her drug addiction. Her stint in jail.

I don’t recall the last time I was this engaged in a fictional character’s life. I felt the pain Joon felt, I felt her hopes, and held back tears as she did when they didn’t come to fruition the way she’d hoped. Or at all for that matter. The suffering and violence of this book are both extremely hard to take, and extremely understandable. Ms. Mun is a cruel writer to make us care so much for someone who is destined to suffer so greatly.

Get Miles from Nowhere on Amazon or on Book Depository