The Aquariums of PyongYang by Kang Chol-Hwan and Pierre Rigoulot

For ten years in his youth, Kang was a prisoner in Yodok, a North Korean concentration camp geared toward "reeducating" ideological traitors and their families. Kang's grandfather had been arrested and "disappeared" for treasonous acts against the Fatherhood, Kim Il-sung. What's likely is that the wealthy Korean-Japanese Kang clan had overstepped their boundaries; were fish out of water by being Korean Japanese, and though the grandmother was a rabid communist believer, the family managed to ...