Ten top books about North Korea

D.B. John began training as a lawyer but switched to a career in publishing, editing popular children’s books on history and science. In 2009 he moved to Berlin, Germany, to write his first novel, Flight from Berlin. A visit to North Korea in 2012 inspired his new novel, Star of the North. One of the author's top ten books about North Korea, as shared at the Guardian:

Nothing to Envy by Barbara Demick

The book that began my obsession with North Korea. With a clear-eyed journalist’s approach, Demick interviewed a dozen defectors who had all fled Chongjin. Once a big industrial hub, by the 90s Chongjin was a corpse-strewn ghost town. Demick follows the defectors’ lives through the tumult around Kim Il-sung’s death in 1994 and the long darkness that followed – the famine. As the adage goes, you don’t know yourself until you know hunger. North Koreans are shown as ordinary people living under an extraordinary system. Through them Demick tells the story of a country.

Read about another entry on the list.

Also see Mary Lynn Bracht's top ten books about South Korea.

--Marshal Zeringue