North Korea

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'?

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.

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 the Hermit Kingdom A Foreign Policy Most Anticipated Book of 2026 For nearly eight decades, North Korea has marched defiantly...

“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...

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. It...

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER An extraordinary insight into life under one of the world’s most ruthless and secretive dictatorships – and the story of one woman’s terrifying struggle to avoid capture/repatriation and guide her family to freedom. As a child growing up in North Korea, Hyeonseo...

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...

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...

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.

North Korea is perhaps the most intriguing, infamous and enigmatic nation of our modern world. Yet how many of us know its full history, and how it came to be? How can we understand such a strange, isolated state? This new edition seeks to provide some answers to these questions. Starting with its origins in the colonial period, Michael J Seth masterfully traces how North Korea transformed itself from a Soviet-style socialist state to the ultra-nationalist, dynastic dictatorship of the 21st century.

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.

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 ...

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.

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 ...

In the shadows of cyberspace, nation-states wage wars that never officially begin — and the analysts who unmask them are the most important investigators you've never heard of. When FireEye discovered that its own network had been breached in December 2020, the trail led not to a single compromised company but to eighteen thousand organizations worldwide — including the US Treasury, the Department of Homeland Security, and the National Nuclear Security Administration. The attackers had hidden inside a routine software update for over a year. But who were they? And how do you identify a ...

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.

An Instant New York Times Bestseller A major military historian explains how and why some societies chose to destroy their foes, and warns that similar wars of obliteration are possible in our time. “A profound book.” —Wall Street Journal War can settle disputes, topple tyrants, and bend...

She Walked Her Dog. She Had 100,000 TikTok Followers. She Was Funding Kim Jong Un's Nuclear Program. In a quiet suburb outside Phoenix, an FBI raid uncovered ninety corporate laptops on metal racks, sticky notes identifying which Fortune 500 company each had been issued by, and a hand-written ledger of stolen American identities. In a back bedroom, the cooling fans of dozens of running machines hummed in the Arizona afternoon — each one logged into a different American payroll system, each one paying a salary that ended up six thousand miles away. The woman running the operation was ...

They shouldn't have tear gassed best-selling (bald) author Adam Fletcher. It ruined his supposedly normal holiday in Istanbul, made him curious, and began a quest to visit places everyone else is trying to escape from, and tourists don't normally go to. In this hilarious travel memoir, he'll enter a blizzard in China armed with only biscuits; pose as a scientist to sneak into Chernobyl; be chased by Croatian police boats en route to Liberland (the world's newest country); become a reluctant diving board star in a North Korean water park, and much more.

How a Seth Rogen comedy triggered the most devastating corporate cyberattack in history — and the first time a nation-state went to war against a private company over a movie. In November 2014, employees at Sony Pictures Entertainment arrived at work to find a grinning red skeleton on their screens and a message from a group calling itself the Guardians of Peace. Within hours, the company's entire network was destroyed. Within weeks, the full scope became clear: terabytes of stolen data, unreleased films on pirate sites, executive emails splashed across front pages, and the personal ...