Rare are the books that don’t describe North Korea as truly weird: the people as either slaves or robots, or the countryside as bleak as the blasted surface of the moon. Rarer still is a book that wraps a realistic depiction of North Korea inside a compelling thriller. A Corpse in the Koryo, the new murder mystery set in the DPRK, is truly one of a kind.

Writing under the pseudonym James Church, A Corpse in the Koryo’s author is an intelligence officer with years of experience working on North Korea. Church’s characters are not the two-dimensional North Korean figures who inhabit the popular Western imagination, but expertly executed composites of the real life North Koreans he dealt with for years: thoughtful, scared, quick to anger, friendly, funny, and sometimes deadly.

A Corpse in the Koryo implicitly asks how can North Koreans—under unrelenting political and social pressure—still function with family, friends and co-workers and retain their essential humanity?

Join a panel of experts including South Korea’s Ambassador to the United Nations Choi Young-jin, Fletcher School dean Stephen Bosworth and international lawyer Lucy Reed— all veteran visitors to the DPRK in their early work with KEDO—to discuss whether and how Church’s critically acclaimed novel answers its own questions. They will also explore the policy issues that Church deftly raises between the lines of A Corpse in the Koryo.

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