NEW ARRIVALS

Under the Same Sky: From Starvation in North Korea to Salvation in America

AUTHOR : Joseph Kim

PUBLISHER: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

PRICE($): 28

GENRE: Biographies & Memoirs

A searing story of starvation and survival in North Korea, followed by a dramatic escape, rescue by activists and Christian missionaries and success in the United States thanks to newfound faith and courage.

Inside the hidden and mysterious world of North Korea, Joseph Kim lived a young boy’s normal life until he was five. Then disaster struck: the first wave of the Great Famine, a long, terrible ordeal that killed millions, including his father, and sent others, like his mother and only sister, on desperate escape routes into China. Alone on the streets, Joseph learned to beg and steal. He had nothing but a street-hardened survival instinct. Finally, in desperation, he too crossed a frozen river to escape to China.

There a kindly Christian woman took him in, kept him hidden from the authorities and gave him hope. Soon, through an underground network of activists, he was spirited to the American consulate and became one of just a handful of North Koreans to be brought to the U.S. as refugees. Joseph knew no English and had never been a good student. Yet the kindness of his foster family changed his life. He turned a new leaf, became a dedicated student, mastered English and made it to college, where he is now thriving thanks to his faith and inner strength. “Under the Same Sky” is an unforgettable story of suffering and redemption.

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The Girl with Seven Names

AUTHOR : Hyeonseo Lee

PUBLISHER: William Collins

PRICE($): 26.99

GENRE: Biographies & Memoirs

An extraordinary insight into life under one of the world’s most ruthless and secretive dictatorships ? and the story of one woman’s terrifying struggle to avoid capture/repatriation and guide her family to freedom.

As a child growing up in North Korea, Hyeonseo Lee was one of millions trapped by a secretive and brutal communist regime. Her home on the border with China gave her some exposure to the world beyond the confines of the Hermit Kingdom and, as the famine of the 1990s struck, she began to wonder, question and realize that she had been brainwashed her entire life. Given the repression, poverty and starvation she witnessed, surely her country could not be, as she had been told, “the best on the planet”? Aged 17, she decided to escape. She could not have imagined that it would be 12 years before she was reunited with her family.

This is the unique story not only of Hyeonseo’s escape from the darkness into the light, but also of her coming of age, education and the resolve she found to rebuild her life ? not once, but twice ? first in China, then in South Korea. Strong, brave and eloquent, this memoir is a triumph of her remarkable spirit.

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Wind/Pinball: Two novels

AUTHOR : Haruki Murakami

PUBLISHER: Knopf

PRICE($): 25.95

GENRE: Literature & Fiction

In the spring of 1978, a young Haruki Murakami sat down at his kitchen table and began to write. The result: two remarkable short novels - “Hear the Wind Sing” and “Pinball, 1973” - that launched the career of one of the most acclaimed authors of our time.

These powerful, at times surreal, works about two young men coming of age - the unnamed narrator and his friend the Rat - are stories of loneliness, obsession and eroticism. They bear all the hallmarks of Murakami’s later books, and form the first two-thirds, with “A Wild Sheep Chase,” of the trilogy of the Rat.

Widely available in English for the first time ever, newly translated and featuring a new introduction by Murakami himself, “Wind/Pinball” gives us a fascinating insight into a great writer’s beginnings.