The immediate temptation is to read Miles From Nowhere (Riverhead, $21.95) as memoir, since the biographical details of first-time novelist Nami Mun correspond roughly to her Korean-American teenage runaway heroine. At 13 Joon, ditches her failing Bronx family to live on the streets of New York, careening through addictions, boyfriends, dubious forms of employment, counseling, and jail. This five-year trek is related in the first person, from a young adult’s imperfect perspective; Joon only knows her own immediate hurts and needs, and has little regard for anything else. Though imagined, her account reads like a diary from one of the runaways in the Seattle documentary Streetwise: a catalog of pimps, beatings, dealers, scars, and other affronts to dignity. Innocence lost. Everything endured by those not in school, without parents, no home of their own. Miles is strongest in its early ’80s, gutter’s eye perspective on the MTV era—how, for instance, hearing the theme song from Fame on the radio makes getting into a car with a John slightly less creepy and awful. Joon decides, “In order to get what I needed—shelter, food, money, friendship—parts of me, piece by piece, would have to be sacrificed.” Something to consider the next time a street urchin asks you for some change. One day, the kid might write a book about it. BRIAN MILLER

Tue., Jan. 6, 7:30 p.m., 2009