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Published Aug 2016
256 pages
Genre: Literary Fiction
Publication Information
Named one of the most anticipated books of the second half of 2016 by The Millions
Yongju is an accomplished student from one of North Korea's most prominent families. Jangmi, on the other hand, has had to fend for herself since childhood, most recently by smuggling goods across the border. Then there is Danny, a Chinese-American teenager whose quirks and precocious intelligence have long made him an outcast in his California high school.
These three disparate lives converge when they flee their homes, finding themselves in a small Chinese town just across the river from North Korea. As they fight to survive in a place where danger seems to close in on all sides, in the form of government informants, husbands, thieves, abductors, and even missionaries, they come to form a kind of adoptive family. But will Yongju, Jangmi and Danny find their way to the better lives they risked everything for?
Transporting the reader to one of the least-known and most threatening environments in the world, and exploring how humanity persists even in the most desperate circumstances, How I Became a North Korean is a brilliant and essential first novel by one of our most promising writers.
"Their haunting stories reveal the darkness of life in North Korea as well as the enormous risk of escape, resulting in a vivid and harrowing read." - Publishers Weekly
"Only Jangmi's travails are believable and compelling. Promising start; disappointing finish." - Kirkus Reviews
"With How I Became a North Korean, Krys Lee takes us into urgent and emotional novelistic terrain...with heart and passion, Lee forges a world no other writer could create, one where the only response to longing and loss is learning to trust and hope again." – Adam Johnson, Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award-winning author of The Orphan Master's Son and Fortune Smiles
"This is one of the best books I've read in a good long while. While North Korea is at the center of the novel, the themes of love, family and our debt to our fellow human beings will resonate universally." – Gary Shteyngart, author of Super Sad True Love Story and Little Failure
This information about How I Became a North Korean was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Krys Lee is the author of the short story collection Drifting House and the recent debut novel How I Became a North Korean, both published by Viking, Penguin Random House. She is a recipient of the Rome Prize and the Story Prize Spotlight Award, the Honor Title in Adult Fiction Literature from the Asian/Pacific American Libraries Association, and finalist for Center for Fiction First Novel Prize and the BBC International Story Prize. Her fiction, journalism, and literary translations have appeared in Granta, The Kenyon Review, Narrative, San Francisco Chronicle, Corriere della Sera, and The Guardian, among others. She is an assistant professor of creative writing and literature at Yonsei University, Underwood International College, in South Korea.
... Full Biography
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Link to Krys Lee's Website
Name Pronunciation
Krys Lee: sounds like kris
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