Author: Marcel Theroux
Publisher: Corsair, 2022
Link to online store *
Growing up amid the starvation and oppression of 1990s North Korea, 10-year-old Cho Jun-su stumbles upon a mysterious game, left behind in a hotel room by a rare foreign visitor.
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. Over time, the game leads Jun-su on a spellbinding and unexpected journey through the hidden layers of his country, towards precocious success, glory, love, betrayal, prison, a spell at the pinnacle of the North Korean elite and an extraordinary kind of redemption.
Warm, uplifting, and deeply-researched, The Sorcerer of Pyongyang is a love story and a tale of survival against the odds. 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.
Source: publisher’s website
LKL says:
Entertaining tale that takes you from the streets of Wonsan, via a prison camp and Kim Jong-chol’s luxurious compound in Pyongyang to a private Eric Clapton gig in Woking and a New Malden pharmacy, in a storyline that’s kicked into motion by a chance discovery of a Dungeons and Dragons manual. While it’s not going to tell you anything new, it’s a fun holiday read which encourages you to think about whether North Koreans have agency, or whether, in D&D speak, everyone is a non-player character with the strings being pulled by the Dungeon Master (ie, whichever member of the Kim dynasty is in charge at the time). (We listened to the audiobook version read by the author).
Marcel Theroux is the brother of journalist / broadcaster Louis Theroux. In the final pages of the book the author tells us about his own Channel 4 documentary about the trafficking and abuse of workers on the Sinan-gun salt farms.
LKL rating: 
External links:
* Where the book is available from a number of sources, they are prioritised as follows: (1) Amazon UK site, or Bookshop.org for the more recent uploads (2) Amazon US site (3) Other sites in US or Europe, including second-hand outlets (4) LTI Korea, where the title is advertised as available from there (5) Onlines stores in Korea. Links to Bookshop.org and Amazon UK site contain an affiliate code which, should you make a purchase, gives a small commission to LKL at no additional cost to you.