His nostrils were full of the smell of damp earth and the oily smoke of the torches that lit the darkness. Inspired by the testimony of North Korean refugees, and drawing on the author's personal experience of North Korea, it testifies to the power of empathy and the human imagination.

The Sorcerer of Pyongyang by Marcel Theroux | Goodreads The Sorcerer of Pyongyang by Marcel Theroux | Goodreads

His life is transformed one day, however, when he accidentally encounters a Dungeons and Dragons rulebook, The Dungeon Masters Guide, left behind by a foreign hotel guest and later picked up by Jun-su’s father, one of the hotel’s kitchen staff. One afternoon at the end of volleyball practice, Jun-su found himself alone in the showers with Tae-il.

On the other hand, any private enterprise was a small step towards re-creating the evils of capitalism and the exploitation of one class by another. He joined his classmates inside the square that marked the air raid assembly point and found himself next to Sok-chung. The comic books’ hand-drawn frames told dramatic stories of space exploration, the strife between feudal monarchs, man-made climatic disasters, and beehives menaced by hostile wasps. Coupons were handed out as usual for rice, cooking oil, meat, and the occasional gray slab of frozen pollock, but when citizens turned up to exchange the vouchers for food at the state-run distribution centers, they were told the shelves were empty.

The Sorcerer of Pyongyang: A Novel by Marcel Theroux The Sorcerer of Pyongyang: A Novel by Marcel Theroux

He accepted it wordlessly, but closed his eyes and nodded in a way that left no doubt about how welcome it was. When Jon Chol-ju died of a heart attack a short time later after a drinking binge, the new hotel manager, in an act of largesse, allowed the staff to choose one memento each from among the objects in the late manager’s lost property cupboard.As Jun-su painstakingly deciphers the rules of the game in secret, he unlocks an inner world that is at first an antidote and then a threat to the political cult that surrounds him. One of the soldiers kicked the sack and it stood up and turned into a person: a pair of legs in stained trousers, a filthy torso, hands manacled tightly behind its back, head and shoulders covered with a loose black hood. Inspired by the testimony of North Korean refugees, and drawing on the author’s personal experience of North Korea, it testifies to the power of empathy and the human imagination. In years to come, he would joke that it was like a celestial object falling from the sky to be discovered by some bewildered nomad and made the centerpiece of a new religion.