How Fast Can You Run
Harriet Levin Millan
Hardcover
(Harvard Square Editions, Dec. 20, 2016)
A migrant novel based on the true story of Lost Boy of Sudan Michael Majok Kuch"The best war novel told from a young boy's perspective since Jerzy Kozinski's The Painted Bird." --Nyoul Lueth Tong, author of There is a Country: New Writing from the New Country of South SudanSet across a backdrop of refugee migration that spans East Africa, the US and Australia, How Fast Can You Run's story of "Lost Boy" of Sudan Michael Majok Kuch unfolds with equal measures of inspiration and heartbreak. Five-year-old Majok wakes in the middle of the night to his burning hut and flees from the soldiers torching his village in South Sudan. He gets separated from his mother and begins a ten year journey, trekking through war zones and living in refugee camps, until he receives political asylum to the US. Majok, now Michael, is given a new start in the US. Yet his new life mirrors his migrant life as he faces discrimination once again, and ultimately betrayal.This extraordinary novel, chosen as a 2017 Charter for Compassion Global Read and now a Foreword Review Book of the Year finalist, is in the words of Mukoma Wa Ngugi, "a beautiful and crucial story told by two people, one Sudanese with dreams of independence, the other, an American poet who listens to Michael Majok through her imagination...reminding us that the most human of all activities, the one thing that binds us all, is finding beauty even in impossible situations."