Description
Book SynopsisA Westerner leaves a Dungeons and Dragons book in a North Korean hotel, which ends up in the hands of a 10-year-old boy growing up during the Arduous March years.
Trade ReviewMarcel Theroux has given us a riveting and poignant story from the hidden world of North Korea. Deeply researched and powerfully imagined, his novel reveals the lives of privileged elites, gulag prisoners and ordinary men and women living in this isolated land. A thriller, a love story and an exploration of the paradoxical emotions of human beings struggling with extreme situations, this is a book by which I was irresistibly gripped. I'm sure many others will find it no less compelling and enjoyable. -- John Gray, author of Feline Philosophy: Cats and the Meaning of Life
A compulsively readable tale, all the better for being set in one of the most secretive countries in the world. In The Sorcerer of Pyongyang, Marcel Theroux captures the extraordinary atmosphere of North Korean life with wit and insight -- Michael Palin
Compelling, mesmerising and eye-opening * Essential Marbella Magazine *
Striking . . . Theroux mischievously crafts a pitiful, repellent character named Jimi, Kim Jong-un's Westernised playboy brother * The Times *
Reading
The Sorcerer of Pyongyang is an informative and entertaining way to learn about North Korea. Theroux's painstaking research intimately reveals the workings of North Korean society, in the public and private spheres . . .
Theroux also writes with intelligence, compassion and an occasional quiet lyricism. Most crucially,
the novel powerfully embodies the plight of North Koreans in the state's vast shadow * The Guardian *
Expert, engrossing...a remarkable bildungsroman...A cleverly imagined tale of psychic repression and escape from it * Kirkus, STARRED review *
