Authors: Kang Chol-Hwan, Pierre Rigoulot

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, North Korean leaders have kept a tight grasp on their one-party state, quashing any nascent opposition movements and sending all suspected dissidents to its brutal concentration camps for “re-education.”

Kang Chol-Hwan is the first survivor of one of these camps to tell his story to the world, documenting the extreme conditions in these gulags and providing a personal insight into life in N. Korea. 

Sent to the notorious labor camp Yodok when he was nine years old, Kang observed frequent public executions and endured forced labor and near-starvation rations for ten years. In 1992, he escaped to South Korea, where he now advocates for human rights in North Korea, according to a review on goodreads.com.

This book brings together unassailable firsthand experience, setting one young man’s personal suffering in the wider context of modern history, giving eyewitness proof of the abuses perpetrated by the North Korean regime.