Jonathan Mirsky
Life Under Kim
Nothing to Envy: Real Lives in North Korea
By Barbara Demick
Granta Books 314pp £14.99 order from our bookshop
Barbara Demick, Beijing bureau chief of the Los Angeles Times, has written a fair, modest and informative book about North Korea, a country little known and less understood.
Between 2001 and 2008 she visited the place nine times and was enveloped in official company throughout. Apart from Pyongyang, a kind of Potemkin village the façade of which one would have to be half-witted not to see through, she merely glimpsed other parts of the country and its people, and ‘no unauthorized conversations took place’.
What she writes is based on conversations in South Korea with a handful of North Korean defectors whose old lives in the same town in the North sound ghastly (almost unbelievably so), and worse than China during the Cultural Revolution, where one could at least strike up an
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
'This is one of the most engaging cold-case novels I have read.'
@NJCooper_crime reviews novels by @sarah_hilary, @erskine_fiona, @aadhand, @claremackint0sh, @imranmahmood777, @NancyCNTucker, @josephknox__, @SlaughterKarin, @T_J_Newman & @Egan_Hughes.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/june-2021-crime-round-up
'Here Rogers’s focus is upon the protracted, often puerile fight between the hardened Grub Street professional and a thin-skinned, unforgiving writer.'
Freya Johnston on the time Alexander Pope took on Grub Street.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/a-writers-revenge
'If a Cuskian invention embarrasses herself, it is her own fault; Cusk has given her the rope and she has hung herself with it. And with this dignity comes a kind of freedom.'
@mmpopkey weighs up Rachel Cusk's 'Second Place'.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/finding-freedom