From Powells.com
Hot new releases and under-the-radar gems for adults and kids.
Staff Pick
You will not soon forget this slim, quietly devastating novel, which relays the aftermath for three orphans working in a hospital in rural Laos during the American bombing campaign. Spare, beautiful writing about forever-altered lives. Recommended By Lori M., Powells.com
Run Me to Earth is a story of human connection in times of unimaginable horror, and the aftereffects of both those relationships and that trauma. It tells the stories of three orphans, separated after working in a makeshift, bombed-out hospital in 1960s Laos. Yoon’s deeply felt novel follows their divergent paths, and tells their tender, heartbreaking stories in a way that feels both intensely personal and vastly universal. Recommended By Michelle C., Powells.com
Synopses & Reviews
From award-winning author Paul Yoon comes a beautiful, aching novel about three kids orphaned in 1960s Laos — and how their destinies are entwined across decades, anointed by Hernan Diaz as "one of those rare novels that stays with us to become a standard with which we measure other books."
Alisak, Prany, and Noi — three orphans united by devastating loss — must do what is necessary to survive the perilous landscape of 1960s Laos. When they take shelter in a bombed out field hospital, they meet Vang, a doctor dedicated to helping the wounded at all costs. Soon the teens are serving as motorcycle couriers, delicately navigating their bikes across the fields filled with unexploded bombs, beneath the indiscriminate barrage from the sky.
In a world where the landscape and the roads have turned into an ocean of bombs, we follow their grueling days of rescuing civilians and searching for medical supplies, until Vang secures their evacuation on the last helicopters leaving the country. It's a move with irrevocable consequences — and sets them on disparate and treacherous paths across the world.
Spanning decades and magically weaving together storylines laced with beauty and cruelty, Paul Yoon crafts a gorgeous story that is a breathtaking historical feat and a fierce study of the powers of hope, perseverance, and grace.
Review
"If you truly believe in the transformative power of literature then you must read this book. Run Me to Earth is a genuine masterpiece; fierce, tender, wise, earth-shattering, pulsating with love and hope." Miriam Toews, author of Women Talking
Review
"Yoon's imaginative prose and affection for his characters make the story larger than a look at the ways people survive... Another masterpiece in miniature about the unpredictable directions a life can take." Kirkus Reviews (Starred Review)
Review
"Yoon again exemplifies his unparalleled ability to create a quietly spectacular narrative that reveals the unfathomable worst and unwavering best of humanity; the result here provides mesmerizing gratification." Booklist (Starred Review)
About the Author
Paul Yoon is the author of two story collections, Once the Shore, which was a New York Times Notable Book, and The Mountain, which was a NPR Best Book of the Year. His novel Snow Hunters won the Young Lions Fiction Award. A recipient of fellowships from the New York Public Library's Cullman Center for Writers and Scholars and the National Endowment for the Arts, he lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with his wife, the fiction writer Laura van den Berg, and their dog, Oscar.
Paul Yoon on PowellsBooks.Blog
When I was young, in the late 1980s, my parents took my brother and me on a trip down to Washington, DC. We traveled often, and often by car, in part because it was too expensive to fly, and because my parents are anxious about flying...
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