How I Became a North Korean by Krys Lee

How I Became a North Korean by Krys Lee

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
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 of North Korean descent whose quirks and precocious intelligence have long marked him as an outcast in his California high school.
These three disparate lives converge when each of them escapes to the region where China borders North Korea Danny to visit his mother, who is working as a missionary there, after a humiliating incident keeps him out of school; Yongju to escape persecution after his father is killed at the hands of the Dear Leader himself; and Jangmi to protect her unborn child. As they struggle 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 most little-known and 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.
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

Krys Lee is the author of the short story collection Drifting House and How I Became a North Korean. 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 a finalist for 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.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780670025688
ISBN 10	0670025682
Title	How I Became a North Korean
Author	Krys Lee
Condition	Unavailable
Publisher	Viking
Year published	2016-08-02
Number of pages	256
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.