D. B. John was born in Wales. He 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 Star of the North. He lives in Angel, London.At CrimeReads he tagged five exceptional novels about North Korea, including:
The Orphan Master's Son by Adam JohnsonRead about the other entries on the list.
Jun Do grew up with nothing, not even a name. He chose his own from the list of the 114 martyrs of the Revolution given to orphans. Trained as a soldier then as a kidnapper, Jun Do carries out his brutal roles with anunemotional curiosity. He does not take the many opportunities he has to defect because he longs to make sense of who he is, and the world that made him—the closed universe of North Korea itself. At times verging on magical realism, especially the scenes featuring the buffoonish Dear Leader, the novel is part thriller, part comic satire, and part exploration of what it means to be human. Winner of the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for fiction, Adam Johnson has written one of the finest novels of this century.
--Marshal Zeringue
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