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."
Harriet Levin Millan is a prize winning poet and writer. Her poetry collection, The Christmas Show, (Beacon Press) was selected for the Barnard New Women Poets Prize and The Poetry Society of America's Alice Fay di Castagnola Award. She received a MFA from the University of Iowa's Writers Workshop and has written for The Kenyon Review, Ploughshares, Prairie Schooner, The Harvard Review, The Iowa Review, PEN America, The Smart Set, among other publications. She and her family founded the Reunion Project and along with the participation of Philadelphia-area high school and college students, raised money to reunite several Lost Boys and Girls of Sudan with their mothers living abroad. She teaches creative writing in the English Department at Drexel University and directs the Certificate Program in Writing and Publishing. She lives with her husband outside Philadelphia.