[NEW ARRIVALS] Without You, There Is No Us: My Time with the Sons of North Korea’s Elite

Without You, There Is No Us: My Time with the Sons of North Korea’s Elite

AUTHOR: Suki Kim

PUBLISHER: Crown

PRICE: $24

GENRE: Biographies & Memoirs

Every day, three times a day, the students march in two straight lines, singing praises to Kim Jong-il and North Korea: “Without you, there is no motherland. Without you, there is no us.” It is a chilling scene, but gradually Suki Kim, too, learns the tune and, without noticing, begins to hum it.

It is 2011, and all universities in North Korea have been shut down for an entire year, the students sent to construction fields - except for the 270 students at the all-male Pyongyang University of Science and Technology (PUST), a walled compound where portraits of Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong-il look on impassively from the walls of every room, and where Suki has accepted a job teaching English.

Over the next six months, she will eat three meals a day with her young charges and struggle to teach them to write, all under the watchful eye of the regime.

“Without You, There Is No Us” offers a moving and incalculably rare glimpse of life in the world’s most unknowable country, and at the privileged young men she calls “soldiers and slaves.”