The Cruelty of Kim

Forced breeding, torture, starvation, rape, execution: This is what it’s like to be a political prisoner in North Korea.

Here’s the cover of the U.K. edition of “Escape from Camp 14,” which will be published by Mantle on March 29. Viking will publish on the same date in the United States. Publishers in Europe, Japan and Latin America will follow.

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“This is a story unlike any other because Shin is one of the few, if not only, long-term prisoners to have escaped from the North Korean gulag.  It is most harrowing not only because it is true, but because the conditions it describes persist to 2011 in North Korea, where a vast gulag is home to hundreds of thousands of slave laborers, including children bred in captivity, like Shin.  More so than any other book on North Korea, including my own, Escape from Camp 14 exposes the cruelty that is the underpinning of Kim Jong Il’s regime. Blaine Harden, a veteran foreign correspondent from The Washington Post, tells this story masterfully. Harden doesn’t flinch from the darker side of the story. He takes straight-on questions about Shin’s credibility and explains methodically how he went about corroborating his story… The integrity of this book shines through on every page” – Barbara Demick, author of Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea

“In Escape from Camp 14, Blaine Harden tells the astonishing tale of Shin Dong-hyuk:  his birth and upbringing amid the barbarism of a North Korean prison camp; his betrayal of family; and his eventual escape and resettlement in the United States. Through the extraordinary arc of Shin’s life, Harden illuminates the North Korea that exists beyond the headlines and creates a moving testament to one man’s struggle to retrieve his own lost humanity” – Marcus Noland, co-author of Witness to Transformation: Refugee Insights into North Korea

“Over 21,000 North Koreans have succeeded in escaping to South Korea by 2011. So far as we know, only one was born in a political prison camp in the notorious North Korean gulag. Author Blaine Harden tells the story of the lucky Mr. Shin, who escaped from twenty-three years of hardship in Camp 14 and found his way to South Korea and eventually to the United States. Mr. Shin’s story, at times painful to read, recounts his physical and psychological journey from a lifetime of imprisonment in a closed and unfeeling prison society to the joys and challenges of life in a free society where he can live like a human being.” – Kongdan Oh, co-author of The Hidden People of North Korea: Everyday Life in the Hermit Kingdom

Escape From Camp 14: One Man’s Remarkable Odyssey from North Korea to Freedom in the West

Blaine Harden. Viking, $26.95 (205p) ISBN 978-0-670-02332-5

With a protagonist born into a life of backbreaking labor, cutthroat rivalries, and a nearly complete absence of human affection, Harden’s book reads like a dystopian thriller. But this isn’t fiction—it’s the biography of Shin Dong-hyuk, the only known person born into one of North Korea’s secretive prison labor camps who has managed to escape and now lives in the U.S. Harden structures Shin’s horrific experience—which includes witnessing the execution of his brother and sister after their escape plan is discovered—around an examination of the role that political imprisonment and forced labor play in North Korea and the country’s fraught relationship with its economically prosperous neighbors South Korea and China While Shin eventually succeeds in escaping North Korea’s brutal dictatorship, adjusting to his new life proves to be extraordinarily difficult, and he wrestles with his complicity in the atrocities of his past—he informed on his mother and other brother, which led to their execution. “I was more faithful to the guards than to my family. We were each other’s spies,” he confesses. Harden wisely avoids depicting the West as a panacea for Shin’s trauma, instead leaving the reader to wonder whether Shin will ever be able to reconcile his past with the present. Harden notes both the difficulty of obtaining information about daily existence in North Korea and of fact-checking such information (including Shin’s own version of events), and the book’s brevity may leave readers wanting more from this brisk, brutal, sorrowful read.

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Coming in March, 2012