A spectacular, definitive portrait of ordinary life within one of the world's most repressive states - North Korea.
'A most perceptive and eye-opening account of everyday life in North Korea' Jung Chang
North Korea is Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four made reality: it is the only country in the world not connected to the internet; where Gone with the Wind is a dangerous, banned book; and where during political rallies, spies study your expression to check your sincerity.
Nothing to Envy weaves together the stories of adversity and resilience of six residents of Chongin, North Korea's third-largest city. From extensive interviews and with tenacious investigative work, Barbara Demick has recreated the concerns, culture and lifestyles of North Korean citizens in a gripping narrative, and vividly reconstructed the inner workings of this extraordinary and secretive country.
Includes an updated afterword by the author.
“Provocative . . . offers extensive evidence of the author’s deep knowledge of this country while keeping its sights firmly on individual stories and human details.”—The New York Times
“Deeply moving . . . The personal stories are related with novelistic detail.”—The Wall Street Journal
“Excellent . . . humanizes a downtrodden, long-suffering people whose individual lives, hopes and dreams are so little known abroad.”—San Francisco Chronicle
“The narrow boundaries of our knowledge have expanded radically with the publication of Nothing to Envy. . . . Elegantly structured and written, [it] is a groundbreaking work of literary nonfiction.”—Slate
“At times a page-turner, at others an intimate study in totalitarian psychology.”—The Philadelphia Inquirer
“Haunting . . . a clear-eyed and deeply reported look at [North Korea].”—The Plain Dealer
“Nothing to Envy must do what journalism hasn’t been required to do for nearly a century: use words to create pictures of scenes that cannot be captured by a camera. With an eloquence seldom found in newspaper journalists, Demick has risen to the occasion—all the more remarkable when you consider that she hasn’t seen these sights herself. She has a novelist’s knack for eliciting the telling detail.”—Salon
“In a stunning work of investigation, Barbara Demick removes North Korea’s mask to reveal what lies beneath its media censorship and repressive dictatorship.”—The Daily Beast
“No writer I know has done a better job of clothing these academic concerns with the rich detail of the lives of ordinary people—explaining, simply, what it feels like to be a citizen of the cruelest, most repressive and most retrograde country in the world. . . . [An] outstanding work of journalism.”—The Times (London)
“These are the stories you’ll never hear from North Korea’s state news agency.”—New York Post
“[A] superbly reported account of life in North Korea.’’—Bloomberg
“[Nothing to Envy] has the ring of authority as well as the suspense of a novel.”—The Washington Times
“The last time I read a book with something truly harrowing or pitiful or sad on every page it was Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, and those characters had the good fortune to not be real.”—St. Louis Magazine
“Strongly written and gracefully structured, Demick’s potent blend of personal narratives and piercing journalism vividly and evocatively portrays courageous individuals and a tyrannized state.”—Booklist (starred review)
“A fascinating and deeply personal look at the lives of six defectors from the repressive totalitarian regime of the Republic of North Korea . . . As Demick weaves [the defectors’] stories together with the hidden history of the country’s descent into chaos, she skillfully re-creates these captivating and moving personal journeys.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
About the Author
Barbara Demick is the author of Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea, which was a finalist for the National Book Award and National Book Critics Circle Award and the winner of the Samuel Johnson Prize in the United Kingdom, and Logavina Street: Life and Death in a Sarajevo Neighborhood. Her books have been translated into more than twenty-five languages. Demick is a staff writer for the Los Angeles Times and a contributor to The New Yorker, and was recently a press fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations
