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Barbara Demick‘s Nothing to Envy – Real Lives in North Korea, is the most disturbing book I have read this year. Chapter 1 begins with a satellite photograph of the Korean peninsula by night with South Korea ‘gleaming with prosperity’ and the ‘area of darkness’ that is North Korea.

Although Barbara Demick has visited North Korea, she has only seen for herself the organised propaganda presented to visitors. However, her work is compiled from interviews with North Koreans who have escaped the most repressive dictatorship on earth.

Her account focuses on Chongjin, and she weaves together the stories of a doctor, a teacher, a mother loyal to the atrocious regime and young people growing up in a world where death and starvation occur all around and propaganda tells them that they are lucky and have nothing to envy. With them we relive the famine and the economic meltdown and see children dying from starvation.

Mrs Song’s story is perhaps the most moving. We live through her first 57 years of obedience and loyalty, and, when she is brought by her daughter to South Korea, we witness her amazement that there is colour, food, and a world that has moved on from the benighted regime she believed in.

Guilt is one of the emotions felt by the refugees and I believe the readers share that feeling when we read how 23 million North Koreans live under such a repressive regime.

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