A remarkable literary discovery and a searing indictment of
political repression
English PEN Translates Award winner
Bandi is the Korean word for firefly. It is the pseudonym of an anonymous dissident writer still living in North Korea.
A must-read! The first book of fiction to come out of North Korea.
(Smuggled.) Fascinating and chilling. Heartfelt and
heartbreaking.
*Margaret Atwood*
If poetry, as Wordsworth said, can be glossed as powerful emotion
recollected in tranquillity, The Accusation reads like powerful
emotion felt right now, in a condition of ongoing crisis ... In its
scope and courage, The Accusation is an act of great love.
*Guardian*
An extraordinary story of people in North Korea ... highly
readable, nuanced and credible
*BBC World Service*
What's especially satisfying about this collection is that its
worth goes well beyond the political or historical. Without
melodrama or hyperbole, Bandi places us in a parallel universe of
oppressive ritual, military-style code words and bizarre
restrictions ... it reads like an Orwellian dystopia, Bandi tears
at the heart with simple illustrations of the tenderness between
husband and wife, parent and child, and a people who gaze at the
larks swooping and soaring above them and marvel at their
freedom.
*The Big Issue*
A collection of courageous and confounding short stories ... It's a
quiet privilege to be given access to the voiceless by listening to
such vivid and uncompromised storytelling ... this collection of
stories seems both a flickering light in North Korea's darkness and
an unintentional reminder that it is getting darker here, too.
*New Statesman*
Revealing the terrible truth of living in a country where any
freedoms are curtailed, where famine and brutality are rife, but
where human belief and hope can survive any odds, this is a
defining read for 2017.
*Emerald Street*
The Solzhenitsyn of Pyongyang ... A luminous testimony, crammed
with irony, on the insane regime of Kim Il-Sung and the
hopelessness of the citizens of North Korea
*L’Express*
Even if one did not know anything about the writer or the way the
manuscript was smuggled out of the country, it would not diminish
the fact that the force of this collection of novellas evokes the
classics of world literature about totalitarianism
*L’ours*
The Accusation makes a lot of contemporary fiction seem tame and
self-indulgent. This truly remarkable book comes from a writer
writing at the risk of their own life. The result may well be the
most important work of fiction published this year.
*The Australian*
how Bandi's collection was smuggled out of the country reveals just
how miraculous it is that it exists at all
*Publisher's Weekly*
an important document of witness
*Kirkus Reviews*
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