Adam Johnson’s novel is part thriller, part coming-of-age novel, and part romance. It won the Pulitzer prize and is likely the most highly regarded of the contemporary books we’re reading this year.

Amazon summarizes the plot as follows: the protagonist, Pak Jun Do, is the haunted son of a lost mother—a singer “stolen” to Pyongyang—and an influential father who runs a work camp for orphans. Superiors in the state soon recognize the boy’s loyalty and keen instincts. Considering himself “a humble citizen of the greatest nation in the world,” Jun Do rises in the ranks. He becomes a professional kidnapper who must navigate the shifting rules, arbitrary violence, and baffling demands of his Korean overlords in order to stay alive. Driven to the absolute limit of what any human being could endure, he boldly takes on the treacherous role of rival to Kim Jong Il in an attempt to save the woman he loves, Sun Moon, a legendary actress “so pure, she didn’t know what starving people looked like.”

Except, in fact, she did because she had been one of them. And that is one of the problems Johnson explores in The Orphan Master’s Son—amongst so much propaganda and so much fiction, where and how can truth be found?

Barb referenced YouTube videos of author Adam Johnson, and there are several. If you go to YouTube and do a search, be sure to add “author” to Adam Johnson’s name.  Apparently there’s a soccer player named Adam Johnson, too.  Here’s one of the videos where Johnson speaks at some length of his experiences in North Korea: