Top ten 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:

North of the DMZ by Andrei Lankov

Lankov is these days one of the leading experts on North Korea, but in the 80s he was a young Soviet student in Pyongyang. This collection of vignettes, written with humour and wit, curates all kinds of fascinating details. One describes the regime’s unembarrassed falsification of the past with “hard evidence”. For example, at the time Kim Jong-il was becoming the heir apparent in the 70s, some 200 “slogan trees” were discovered in the forests of Mount Paektu. Supposedly carved by communist partisans in 1942, they praised the newborn Kim. “A Great Sun has been born!”

Read about the other entries on the list.

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

--Marshal Zeringue