Non-fiction
Fourth Estate
2010
Nothing to Envy is Barbara Demick’s rightly praised history of North Korea in the early to late 1990s, as experienced by North Koreans. Demick spent years interviewing North Korean defectors living in China and South Korea to compile the book. Through their stories, Demick follows the crises in the isolated state that started developing with the collapse of the Soviet Union. Many political commentators assumed this would lead to the collapse of North Korea as well. As of time of writing, this has clearly not yet happened.