This is often referred to as the book you must read on North Korea if you only choose one. It is based on interviews with refugees from Chongjin, an industrial city in the north of the country. The award-winning text, by the Los Angeles Times journalist who oversaw the newspaper’s bureaus in both Seoul and Beijing, follows the lives of six people in a city completely off limits to outsiders. It spans the chaotic years in which the Orwellian regime’s first leader, Kim Il Sung, died and his son Kim Jong Il rose to power. It includes details of the devastating effects of a famine that is thought to have killed 20 percent of the population. Rather than focusing on the geopolitics and the nuclear program, Nothing to Envy shows the reader the everyday lives of ordinary people living within one of the world’s most repressive regimes.