The novel of the American writer Adam Johnson (published in USA in 2012). Dedicated to the propaganda, government control and the life of the common people in North Korea. The novel won the 2013 Pulitzer Prize in Fiction.
North Korea, the beginning of the XXI century. In the country where Kim Jong-il’s personality cult rules, flourish the poverty, corruption and atrocities of the government against its own people, deprived of the fundamental human rights. Public executions, concentration camps and prison mines, slavery, kidnapping of the Japanese and South Koreans, twenty-four-hour propaganda and forbidding of all foreign – this is the real life of people whom the government machine turns into zombies.
The main character of the novel – a boy from an orphanage, at 14 he becomes a soldier who’s trained to fight in the dark tunnels under DMZ, and after a few years - a ruthless kidnapper. As a reward for his “advances” they send him as a radio officer on a fishing boat which in fact spies on the foreign boats. Later after the atrocious “test” he gets in
America as a translator of the diplomatic delegation where he’s accidently aken for the minister of the prison mines.
The spectacular story about his unbelievable, almost absurd adventures is full of tragedy and sacrificial love, blind submission to the Juche ideology and the sense of duty to those you hold dear. The author intentionally lays on the colours too thickly making the novel like a “bomb exploding right out of the blue” in the civilized society.
The book is destined for the wide audience.
THIS BOOK IS THE 2012 BESTSELLER ACCORDING TO:
New York Times, Washington Post, Entertainment Weekly, Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Financial Times, Newsweek/The Daily Beast, Plain Dealer, St/ Louis Post-Dispatch, Newsday, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, USA Today, Vogue, Elle, GQ, Time Out , Playboy, Cosmopolitan
- 2013 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction
- 2013 Dayton Literary Peace Prize Winner
- 2013 The Morning News Tournament of Books
- 2012 National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist
- Longlisted for The American Library Association`s Andrew Carnegie Medial
- Winner of The California Book Award for Fiction
- New York Times Bestseller
WORLD BESTSELLER
The book is in the TOP-100 bestsellers and in the TOP-20 of the "Foreign fiction" section in the bookstore "Moskva" on Tverskaya street.
|
