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Audiobooks > Biography & Autobiography >  Political > Dear Leader: Poet, Spy, Escapee—A Look Inside North Korea

Download Dear Leader: Poet, Spy, Escapee—A Look Inside North Korea Audiobook

Extended Audio Sample Dear Leader: Poet, Spy, Escapee—A Look Inside North Korea Audiobook, by Jang Jin-sung Click for printable size audiobook cover
0 out of 50 out of 50 out of 50 out of 50 out of 5 0.00 (0 ratings) (rate this audio book) Author: Jang Jin-sung Narrator: Daniel York Publisher: Simon & Schuster Audio Format: Unabridged Audiobook Delivery: Instant Download Audio Length: Release Date: July 2014 ISBN: 9781442375802
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In this rare insider’s view into contemporary North Korea, a high-ranking counterintelligence agent describes his life as a former poet laureate to Kim Jong-il and his breathtaking escape to freedom.

“The general will now enter the room.”

Everyone turns to stone. Not moving my head, I direct my eyes to a point halfway up the archway where Kim Jong-il’s face will soon appear…

As North Korea’s state poet laureate, Jang Jin-sung led a charmed life. With food provisions (even as the country suffered through its great famine), a travel pass, access to strictly censored information, and audiences with Kim Jong-il himself, his life in Pyongyang seemed safe and secure. But this privileged existence was about to be shattered. When a strictly forbidden magazine he lent to a friend goes missing, Jang Jin-sung must flee for his life.

Never before has a member of the elite described the inner workings of this totalitarian state and its propaganda machine. An astonishing exposé told through the heart-stopping story of Jang Jin-sung’s escape to South Korea, Dear Leader is a rare and unprecedented insight into the world’s most secretive and repressive regime.

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Quotes & Awards

  • “A singular and powerful story, rare not only in its portrait of the inner workings of Pyongyang’s elite circles, but rare because a true writer—almost unheard of in North Korea—was there to see it and to tell it.”

    Adam Johnson, New York Times bestselling author of The Orphan Master’s Son

  • “A look inside the mysteries of North Korea by the former poet laureate for the late Kim Jong-il. Likely to fascinate anyone who’s read Adam Johnson’s Pulitzer-winning novel The Orphan Master’s Son.”

    USA Today

  • “Gripping.”

    Financial Times

  • “A North Korean defector finds fleeing the Kim dictatorship as nightmarish as living under it in this harrowing memoir…Much of the book is a thriller-like narrative of Jang’s 2004 escape into the netherworld of illegal North Korean refugees in China, where he drifts, penniless and hunted by the police, through the glittering wealth and hard-edged anomie of modern Chinese cities, dependent on the kindness of random strangers. Jang’s almost impossibly dramatic story is one of the best depictions yet of North Korea’s nightmare.”

    Publishers Weekly

  • “An exciting escape closes this urgent, well-rendered attempt to penetrate North Korea’s cynical, criminal power strategy.”

    Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
  • One of Kirkus Reviews’ Best Books of 2014
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About the Author

Jang Jin-sung is a former poet laureate for North Korean leader Kim Jong-il. Since leaving the country he has become a bestselling author and widely solicited commentator on North Korea. He has been awarded the Rex Warner Literary Prize and read his poetry at London’s Cultural Olympiad in 2012. He now lives in South Korea and is editor in chief of New Focus International, an authoritative website reporting on North Korea.

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