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 that afternoon.
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, 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 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. Not all the danger looks the same. Some of it is plain: hunger, checkpoints, bound wrists, men who take what they want. Some of it comes as a contract, a fee, a clerk who is only doing his job. 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 walking the migrant road. 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.