Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea

Summary

A reconstruction of daily life inside North Korea drawn from years of interviews with defectors, following six individuals through famine, state terror, bereavement, and ultimately escape across the Chinese border. Demick chose to focus on Chongjin, an industrial city in the far north rarely visited by outsiders, in order to avoid the stage-managed quality of accounts centred on Pyongyang. The book remains one of the most intimate and reliable portraits of life under one of the world's most opaque regimes, and has been widely used in human-rights advocacy and university courses on authoritarian states.