Thanks for the tip! Ordering it! I've actually visited North Korea 10 years ago as a part of a group tour. Spent 6 days there and saw pretty much the same places, monuments etc as everyone else who visits the country. One thing I'll never forget was seeing thousands (no exaggeration) of people doing hard manual labour when building the then new airport. Hard manual labour we've replaced with machines over here. Needless to say, I've not seen anything like it before nor after. I just messaged the mate I was there with about this book in case he wanted a copy as well. Apparently he's already read it. He has somewhat of a fascination with the country so he's read a lot about it. His exact words about the book: "Very good but also very tragic". At times like this I'm reminded how good life here is. There are problems then there's real problems.

That's such a crazy story. I found Beijing hard enough!

Hahah! What did you find hard about Beijing? I liked Beijing which I visited on that exact same trip. Flew in to Pyongyang from Beijing and took the train back to Beijing once the tour was over.

Weirdly, it was firstly ordering food. I'd done a Mandarin course before the trip, but my pronunciation was absolutely awful so we ended up either pointing or eating at places with pictures on the menu. secondly, the public toilets!!! 'wear gas mask, use safety harness, don't fall in'

Hah! Yeah, the public toilets in China have a lot of catching up to do for sure. Hole in the ground is one thing which isn't fun of course, but it can be managed. The lack of privacy in some of them is a different matter though. I'm never going to get used to that. I'm lucky enough to have a bladder and guts that are somewhat easy to control. Have kept visits to a minimum. Got the book btw! Currently reading Haruki Murakami's "Kafka on The Shore", will do "The Girl with Seven Names" after.