Thirteen-year-old Miles Jensen sets out to walk three thousand miles north, from an orphanage in Costa Rica to a farm outside Oshkosh, Wisconsin.
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. One year, baby. Then we go home, she used to tell him. She did not survive that afternoon.
Eight months later he is the only American 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 in Wisconsin. 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 sixteen-year-old Nicaraguan girl who has an aunt's address in Los Angeles and no papers at all, and an American man who used to launder money for men who are still in business. Some of the danger is plain: hunger, checkpoints, bound wrists, men who take what they want. Some of it arrives as a contract, a fee, a clerk who is only doing his job.
Because the famine that followed the flare killed tens of millions in the United States, and the country that survived it needs hands. The recruiters are government-approved. The wages are competitive. The debt is itemized. Everything is legal, and nobody who signs is ever going home.
Miles is the only one of them carrying papers that prove he belongs somewhere. The road teaches him exactly what that is worth, and then it asks him to help.
Sanctuary is a debut novel about migration told in reverse. It is about complicity and the cost of survival: what a document is worth, who is ever asked for one, and how many decent people have to look away for a system to keep running.
For readers of The Underground Railroad, Never Let Me Go, and Beasts of No Nation.
