The Clan Records: Five Stories of Korea. Kajiyama Toshiyuki. University of Hawaii Press, 1995 (translated).
The Clan Records is a collection of five short stories by a Japanese author who was born in Seoul (then called Keijo) in 1930, where his father was a civil engineer, and grew up there until he was repatriated [...]

Mike Chinoy, formerly CNN’s senior Asia correspondent, has a new book, Meltdown: The Inside Story of the North Korean Nuclear Crisis, which attempts to tell the story of North Korea’s development of nuclear weapons and America’s attempts to stop their program. Chinoy is currently a visiting professor at the Annenberg School of Journalism at the [...]

The Tears of My Soul. Kim Hyun-hee. William Morrow and Company, Inc., 1993.
This book is well worth reading primarily because it offers a glimpse into the training and operational procedures of North Korea’s intelligence services. I’m not sure if the descriptions of training are credible or not, but have not found information to the [...]

A Corpse in the Koryo. James Church. Thomas Dunne Books, 2006.
This is a mystery set mostly in Pyongyang and Manpo, North Korea. The the main character, Inspector O, is an investigator in the Investigations Department of the Internal Security Bureau. As the title indicates there is a murder in the Koryo Hotel and Inspector [...]

This list of books on North Korea includes my own favorites, as well as a few books recommended to me that I’ve not yet read but plan to. If you have any suggestions, please post them in a comment.

Kim Il-sung: The North Korea Leader, by Suh Dae-sook (1995)
Kim Il-song’s North Korea, by Helen-Louise Hunter (1999)
The [...]

American Defector. Mark D. Treston. Victoria: Trafford Publishing, 2003.
The title of this book, as well as the brief description on the back cover, makes one wonder if it’s about Charles Jenkins or one of the other soldiers that defected to North Korea in the 1960s. But it is not; the author presents the book as [...]

Hamel’s Journal and a Description of the Kingdom of Korea, 1654-1666, Revised Edition. Hendrik Hamel. Translated by Jean-Paul Buys. Seoul Computer Press, 1998.
Hamel’s Journal is the story of Hendrik Hamel, the bookkeeper of the Dutch Ship Sperwer (‘Sparrow Hawk’ – now you know the origin of the blog of the same name), that [...]

Crisis on the Korean Peninsula: How to Deal with a Nuclear North Korea. Michael O’Hanlon and Mike Mochizuki. McGraw-Hill, 2003
In Crisis on the Korean Peninsula, O’Hanlon and Mochizuki layout a “grand deal” designed to diffuse not just the nuclear issue, but also the possibility of a conventional military confrontation and address human rights in North [...]

Offspring of Empire: The Koch’ang Kims and the Origins of Korean Capitalism 1876-1945. Carter J. Eckert. University of Washington Press, 1991, revised 1997.
Offspring of Empire uses the Koch’ang Kim family as representative example in order to make the point that modern Korean capitalism had its origins in the colonial era, rather that the pre-colonial Chosun [...]

In my opinion, this book is at the top of the must reads for anyone who wants a well-grounded understanding of North Korea. If you want to understand the political history of the DPRK you must study Kim Il Sung rather than the system – Kim Il Sung was (and still is) the system.
Kim Il [...]