The Accusation: Forbidden Stories from Inside North Korea
Statues of Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il by Bjørn Christian Tørrissen , [ CC BY-SA 3.0 ] A man with a wife and family, Bandi risked all he had to publish this book. When his relative offered to help smuggle the manuscript out of the country, he chose to accept, ultimately trusting his and his family's lives to the success of the plan. Handing the secret pages over to the liaison must have been agonizing, but his gamble paid off: the book survived the journey out. Bandi, much like Jang Jin-Sung , held a position of literary eminence in North Korea. Disillusioned by what he saw in the Kim Il-Sung regime, Bandi decided to start writing the truth in secret, placing himself in potentially fatal danger. The Accusation is a collection of short stories penned in the early-to-mid 90s, in which Bandi exposed Communist abuses through fiction and the lives of characters who feel more real than imagined. The book was first published in English hardcover edition in 2017, and...