Book Review: Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea by Barbara Demick
In Nothing to Envy by Barbara Demick, the author masterfully weaves together the true stories of six North Korean defectors, offering a rare and intimate look at life inside one of the world’s most isolated and secretive nations. Through years of careful interviews and meticulous research, Demick brings to life the everyday struggles, hopes, and heartbreaks of ordinary people living under extraordinary oppression.
What makes Nothing to Envy so powerful is its focus on the personal rather than the political. Demick does not present statistics or broad theories; instead, she shows how history unfolds in the kitchens, classrooms, and crowded apartments of real families. Her subjects are teachers, students, lovers, parents — people who once believed in their government but gradually awoke to the reality of its betrayals.
Demick’s writing is clear, compassionate, and deeply humanizing. She captures not only the horrors of famine and repression but also the small acts of courage, the dreams quietly nurtured, and the strength it takes to endure. Through these stories, the reader gains a profound understanding of what it means to live without freedom — and what it costs to leave everything behind in search of it.
Nothing to Envy is as heartbreaking as it is illuminating. It challenges readers to look beyond headlines and propaganda, to see North Koreans not as faceless victims, but as individuals whose lives, loves, and losses matter.
Barbara Demick’s work is a powerful act of bearing witness. It is a reminder that even in the darkest places, human dignity and the longing for a better life persist. This is an essential, unforgettable book that lingers long after the final page is turned.
Check out all my reviews of North Korean Defector Memoirs here.
About Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea by Barbara Demick
An eye-opening account of life inside North Korea—a closed world of increasing global importance—hailed as a “tour de force of meticulous reporting” (The New York Review of Books), with a new afterword that revisits these stories—and North Korea more broadly—in 2022, in the wake of the pandemic.
In this landmark addition to the literature of totalitarianism, award-winning journalist Barbara Demick follows the lives of six North Korean citizens over fifteen years—a chaotic period that saw the death of Kim Il-sung, the rise to power of his son Kim Jong-il (the father of Kim Jong-un), and a devastating famine that killed one-fifth of the population.
Demick brings to life what it means to be living under the most repressive regime today—an Orwellian world that is by choice not connected to the Internet, where displays of affection are punished, informants are rewarded, and an offhand remark can send a person to the gulag for life. She takes us deep inside the country, beyond the reach of government censors, and through meticulous and sensitive reporting we see her subjects fall in love, raise families, nurture ambitions, and struggle for survival. One by one, we witness their profound, life-altering disillusionment with the government and their realization that, rather than providing them with lives of abundance, their country has betrayed them.
