Thirteen-year-old Miles Jensen walks three thousand miles north through a collapsed world to reach a home he no longer recognizes.
When a solar storm burned out every circuit on Earth, the world stopped in an afternoon: planes down, grids dark, borders hardening. Miles was in Costa Rica with his mother, counting the months until they would go home to Wisconsin. One year, baby. Then we go home, she used to tell him. She did not survive the year.
Eight months after her death, he is the only American boy in an orphanage that is running out of food, where the older children are pushed out through the gate as they age. Then a letter arrives, hand-carried three thousand miles by strangers, addressed to a mother who is already dead. His grandparents are alive on their farm outside Oshkosh. 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 a girl chasing an aunt's address in Los Angeles, a boy determined to find the sister he left behind, and a man whose past is written in the scars on his hands. Ahead lie eight borders, armed checkpoints, forged papers, and an employment program promising documented work in the United States: contracts, medical screenings, transport north, everything professional and itemized, every road ending at the same auction floor. Miles is the only one of them carrying papers that prove he belongs somewhere, and the road teaches him exactly what that is worth.
Sanctuary is a debut novel about migration told in reverse, an American child moving north toward a country sliding into something it refuses to name, defended by decent people who look away. It asks what the word means when every door is closed, and who is permitted to walk through the ones that open.
For readers of Exit West, Lost Children Archive, and The Road.
