North Korea

Barbara Demick's Nothing to Envy follows the lives of six North Koreans over fifteen years - a chaotic period that saw the death of Kim Il-sung and the unchallenged rise to power of his son, Kim Jong-il, and the devastation of a far-ranging famine that killed one-fifth of the population. Taking us into a landscape never before seen, Demick brings to life what it means to be an average Korean citizen, living under the most repressive totalitarian regime today.

North Korea is like no other tyranny on Earth. Its citizens are told their home is the greatest nation in the world, and Big Brother is always watching. It is Orwell's 1984 made reality. Huge factories with no staff or electricity, hospitals with no patients, uniformed child soldiers, and the world-famous and eerily empty DMZ - the Demilitarized Zone, where North Korea ends and South Korea begins - are all framed by a relentless flow of regime propaganda from omnipresent loudspeakers. Free speech is an illusion: one word out of line, and the gulag awaits.

As a child growing up in North Korea, Hyeonseo Lee was one of millions trapped by a secretive and brutal communist regime. Her home on the border with China gave her some exposure to the world beyond the confines of the Hermit Kingdom and, as the famine of the 1990s struck, she began to wonder, question and realise that she had been brainwashed her entire life. Given the repression, poverty and starvation she witnessed surely her country could not be, as she had been told, 'the best on the planet'?

“I am most grateful for two things: that I was born in North Korea, and that I escaped from North Korea.” —Yeonmi Park “One of the most harrowing stories I have ever heard—and one of the most inspiring.” —The Bookseller In In Order to Live, Yeonmi Park shines a light not just into...

Ruled by a maniacal dictator and cut off from the outside world, the citizens of North Korea are living in a darkness that has nearly destroyed them. Famine, malnourishment, and poverty are rampant as the North Korean government spends fortunes on nuclear weapons testing. Christians inside the closed nation face brutal persecution to ensure the underground church survives. But hope is not completely lost. Everyday, brave men and women put their lives on the line to bring light into the darkness. “Braving North Korea” is a collection of their covert stories of rescue, aid, and ...

Imagine if you were told where to live and work, that your country's leader was an all-powerful god, and that if a relative did something wrong, your whole family would be punished. That is life in North Korea. In our story, after tragedy steals 14-year-old Dae's parents away, he tries to escape to freedom. Experience the challenges and adventures through his eyes in this unforgettable story of hope.The Survival Series that celebrates the awesome history of us. Asian/Pacific American Award for Children's Literature winner Ellie Crowe and bestselling children's author Scott Peters tell this ...

"Destined to become a classic" (Iris Chang, author of The Rape of Nanking), this harrowing memoir of life inside North Korea was the first account to emerge from the notoriously secretive country -- and it remains one of the most terrifying. Amid escalating nuclear tensions, Kim Jong-un and...

North Korea is one of the most troubled societies on earth. The country's 24 million people live under a violent dictatorship led by a single family, which relentlessly pursues the development of nuclear arms, which periodically incites risky military clashes with the larger, richer, liberal South, and which forces each and every person to play a role in the "theater state" even as it pays little more than lip service to the wellbeing of the overwhelming majority.

A New York Times bestseller, the shocking story of one of the few people born in a North Korean political prison to have escaped and survived. Blaine Harden's latest book, King of Spies, will be available from Viking in Fall 2017. North Korea is isolated and hungry, bankrupt and belligerent...

THE STORY THEY COULDN'T HACK: In this international bestseller, a high-ranking counterintelligence agent describes his life as a former poet laureate to Kim Jong-il and his breathtaking escape to freedom. As North Korea’s State Poet Laureate, Jang Jin-sung led a charmed life. With food...

Half-Korean, half-Japanese, Masaji Ishikawa has spent his whole life feeling like a man without a country. This feeling only deepened when his family moved from Japan to North Korea when Ishikawa was just thirteen years old, and unwittingly became members of the lowest social caste. His father, himself a Korean national, was lured to the new Communist country by promises of abundant work, education for his children, and a higher station in society. But the reality of their new life was far from utopian.

Andrei Lankov has gone where few outsiders have ever been. A native of the former Soviet Union, he lived as an exchange student in North Korea in the 1980s. He has studied it for his entire career, using his fluency in Korean and personal contacts to build a rich, nuanced understanding. In The Real North Korea, Lankov substitutes cold, clear analysis for the overheated rhetoric surrounding this opaque police state.

From the bestselling author of Escape from Camp 14, the murderous rise of North Korea’s founding dictator and the fighter pilot who faked him out In The Great Leader and the Fighter Pilot, New York Times bestselling author Blaine Harden tells the riveting story of how Kim Il Sung grabbed power...

NATIONAL BESTSELLER The North Korean defector, human rights advocate, and bestselling author of In Order to Live sounds the alarm on the culture wars, identity politics, and authoritarian tendencies tearing America apart. After defecting from North Korea, Yeonmi Park found liberty and freedom in...

Braving North Korea Vol. 2 continues the eye-opening journey of Volume 1 by bringing to light the courageous personal accounts of those who dare undercover ministry against North Korea's oppressive regime. Through this captivating read, you will be exposed to the daily struggles, atrocities and horrors faced by North Koreans as well as the missionary efforts that attempt to bring hope and relief for those trapped within the oppressive closed-country. Through firsthand accounts and harrowing narratives, this book exposes the hardships imposed upon North Korean citizens by their government as...

The INSTANT New York Times bestseller Instant Los Angeles Times bestseller Finalist, Dayton Literary Peace Prize One of NPR's Books We Love One of Newsweek Staffers' Favorite Books of the Year Shortlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize “In Nuclear War: A Scenario, Annie Jacobsen gives us a...

Every Falling Star, the first book to portray contemporary North Korea to a young audience, is the intense memoir of a North Korean boy named Sungju who is forced at age 12 to live on the streets and fend for himself. To survive, Sungju creates a gang and lives by thieving, fighting, begging, and stealing rides on cargo trains. Sungju richly recreates his scabrous story, depicting what it was like for a boy alone to create a new family with his gang, his "brothers".

There is an ancient Chinese proverb that states, "Two tigers cannot share the same mountain." However, in East Asia, there are three tigers on that mountain: China, Japan, and Korea, and they have a long history of turmoil and tension with each other. In his latest entertaining and thought-provoking narrative travelogue, Michael Booth sets out to discover how deep, really, the enmity is between these three "tiger" nations and what prevents them from making peace.

A landmark history of North Korea, told through the rise of the Kim dynasty and its surprising ties to American Christianity—a spectacular, penetrating account of a world like no other North Korea. The Hermit Kingdom. For nearly eight decades, it has marched defiantly to its own beat, shaking...

North Korea is an open-air prison from which there is no escape. Only a handful of men and women have succeeded. Jihyun Park is one of these rare survivors. Twice she left the land of the ‘socialist miracle’ to flee famine and dictatorship. By the age of 29, she had already witnessed a lifetime of suffering. Family members had died of starvation; her brother was beaten nearly to death by soldiers. Even smiling and laughing was discouraged.