Nothing To Envy

WINNER OF THE SAMUEL JOHNSON PRIZE FOR NON-FICTION

A spectacular, definitive portrait of ordinary life within one of the world’s most repressive states – North Korea.

‘A most perceptive and eye-opening account of everyday life in North Korea’ Jung Chang

North Korea is Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four made reality: it is the only country in the world not connected to the internet; where Gone with the Wind is a dangerous, banned book; and where during political rallies, spies study your expression to check your sincerity.

Nothing to Envy weaves together the stories of adversity and resilience of six residents of Chongin, North Korea’s third-largest city. From extensive interviews and with tenacious investigative work, Barbara Demick has recreated the concerns, culture and lifestyles of North Korean citizens in a gripping narrative, and vividly reconstructed the inner workings of this extraordinary and secretive country.

Includes an updated afterword by the author.

‘Impossible to put down … helps restore humanity to some of the world’s most oppressed people’ Observer

Author Biography

Barbara Demick won the Samuel Johnson Prize for Nothing to Envy (Granta, 2010), her seminal book on North Korea, and was longlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction for Eat the Buddha (Granta 2020). She is also the author of Besieged (Granta, 2012), her account of the war in Sarajevo, which won the George Polk Award, the Robert F Kennedy Award and was shortlisted for a Pulitzer Prize. She lives in New York.