Eagerly Awaiting: November 2022
Previous: Eagerly Awaiting: October 2022
Next: Eagerly Awaiting: December 2022
2022 Booker Prize Winner!
Fab. a. suspenseful page-turner; b. hilariously cringey; c. who doesn't need therapy including your therapist? d. elegantly creepy; e. a novel perfect for these times but set in those times. --Erica
You read this, you remember it forever. Lovely, heartbreaking, Irish as hell. --Erica
Jun-su, a young boy living through the brutality of the North Korean Famine, comes across a copy of the Dungeons and Dragons Dungeon Master's Guide and falls deeply in love with the worlds he can now create, enormously different from the life he's used to under Kim Jong-il. The strange book's cover and themes land him in a brutal prison camp where he has to fight to stay alive and try to hold on to himself in the face of totalitarianism. A well-researched, well-written and beautifully told portrait of a kid growing up different in 1990s North Korea trying to do more than survive. --Colin