Run Me to Earth, Paul Yoon
Run Me to Earth, Paul Yoon
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Run Me to Earth

Author: Paul Yoon

Narrator: Ramón de Ocampo

Unabridged: 6 hr

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 01/28/2020


Synopsis

From award-winning author Paul Yoon comes a “spellbinding” (The Washington Post) 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, this “richly layered” (The New York Times Book Review, Editors’ Choice) book weaves together storylines laced with beauty and cruelty. Paul Yoon’s “greatest skill lies in crafting subtle moments that underline the strange and specific sadness inherent to trauma” (Time) and this book is a breathtaking historical feat and a fierce study of the powers of hope, perseverance, and grace.

About Paul Yoon

Paul Yoon is the author of six works of fiction: Etna; Once the Shore, a New York Times Notable Book; Snow Hunters, winner of the Young Lions Fiction Award; The Mountain, an NPR Best Book of the Year; Run Me to Earth, a Time Must-Read Books of 2020 and longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction; and The Hive and the Honey, winner of the 20th Annual Story Prize and longlisted for the Joyce Carol Oates prize.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Roxane on February 05, 2020

This is a novel about friendship and war and trauma and separation and suffering, how people try to maintain their humanity even when they are treated like animals. The first section is gloriously good and overall, this is an outstanding novel. I admire the elegance of the structure. With each progr......more

Goodreads review by Nilufer on May 03, 2021

Breathe in. Breathe out. One more time: Breathe in. Breathe out. Another book crushed my soul and sledgehammered and stabbed my heart several times. Another stunning, emotional, heartbreaking reading. Normally I have high pain tolerance and I never mind reading gory, crude, dark stories but this boo......more

Goodreads review by Angela M on November 28, 2019

I have read and been moved by the beautiful writing and affecting stories by Paul Yoon with two other books, one a novel and one a collection of stories, but this one - omg - is just so stunningly horrific and beautiful at once! It’s eye opening, shedding light on a conflict in Southeast Asia, not V......more

Goodreads review by Karen on December 14, 2019

This was a very intense, heartbreaking, yet beautiful book. The struggle of three teenage orphans to survive in Laos, beginning in 1969. Tons of bombs were being dropped and many of them never detonated..a state of constant danger. The three...Alisak, Prany and his sister Nori, friends and neighbors f......more

Goodreads review by Tammy on January 07, 2020

Three orphans struggle to survive amid the relentless bombing of Laos. The bombs leave in their wake death, carnage and unexploded remnants making travel by foot or vehicle a potentially deadly undertaking. And, the sky: The hopelessness reflected in a sky obliterated by bombing. A partially visible......more


Quotes

"Narrator Ramón de Ocampo's even tone is the perfect match for this quiet historical novel. In 1960s Laos, three teenagers orphaned by war find work at a nearby abandoned field hospital. A doctor there helps them to flee the country, but, separated during the escape, their lives spin out in vastly different directions. The story shifts through time, space, and point of view, but de Ocampo's steady narration never wavers. There's a matter-of-factness in his voice that acknowledges the horrors these characters live through without slipping into sensationalism. At its heart, this is an audiobook about the diaspora of war, and about the devastating, rippling, and occasionally redemptive consequences of seemingly minor decisions. De Ocampo's beautiful and brutal narration is as lush and mesmerizing as the prose itself."