North Korea at the beginning of the 21st century. In a country ruled by the cult of personality of Kim Jong Il, poverty, corruption and cruelty of the authorities towards their own people, deprived of basic human rights, flourish. Public executions, concentration camps and prison mines, slavery, kidnappings of Japanese and South Koreans, round-the-clock propaganda and a ban on everything foreign - this is the reality of the existence of people whom the state machine turns into zombies. The main character of the novel, a boy from an orphanage, becomes a soldier at the age of 14, who is trained to fight in the dark tunnels dug in the demilitarized zone, and a few years later becomes a ruthless kidnapper. As a reward for his “successes,” he is sent as a radio operator on a fishing boat, which in reality spies on foreign ships. Subsequently, after a cruel “test”, he ends up in America as a translator for a diplomatic delegation, where by chance he is mistaken for the Minister of Prison Mines. The exciting story of his incredible, on the verge of absurdity, adventures is full of tragedy and sacrificial love, blind submission to the Juche ideology and feelings debt towards loved ones. The author deliberately exaggerates the colors, which makes this novel akin to “a bomb exploding out of the blue” in a civilized society. Some critics compare Johnson’s novel, written in the popular genre of magical realism, with the works of George Orwell, the author of world-famous satirical works denouncing totalitarianism - “ 1984" and "Animal Farm" and Aldous Huxley, author of the dystopian satirical novel "Brave New World". The novel received the Pulitzer Prize, which is considered one of the most prestigious US awards in the field of fiction and journalism. He is included in the top lists of such publications as the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Entertainment Weekly, New York Times, Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Financial Times, Newsweek/The Daily Beast, The Plain Dealer, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, USA Today, Vogue, Elle, GQ, Time Out, Playboy. It is the leader in sales of a number of independent book chains in the United States.