This book won the BBC Samuel Johnson Prize for 2010 and it is as the cover says 'outstanding journalism'. I loved it. The literary technique of looking at the world's last surviving communist totalitarian regime through the life experiences of defectors works extremely well.
Kim Forrester has a great review of it here. It is Orwellian in the true sense, and it is real. That's chilling, especially the accounts of the famine in the 1990s:
The thing that amazed me most about this book, was less the glimpses of life lived in a Totalitarian society (it's no exaggeration to say this is George Orwell's 1984 writ large, the only thing missing seems to be the "two-minutes hate"), but the devastating impact of the nation's food shortages. According to Demick, this resulted in some 10 per cent of the North Korean population dying of starvation -- in 1998 the estimated casualties totalled 600,000 to 2 million.
Demick painstakingly reveals the desperate acts so many people had to carry out to find food. It makes for harrowing reading at times. I particularly felt for schoolteacher Mi-ran, who watches her young students wasting away in front of her eyes, knowing there is nothing she can do to save them from starvation.
I wish we had more journalism like this effort,
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