Marcel Theroux has given us a riveting and poignant story from the hidden world of North Korea. Deeply researched and powerfully imagined, his novel reveals the lives of privileged elites, gulag prisoners and ordinary men and women living in this isolated land. A thriller, a love story and an exploration of the paradoxical emotions of human beings struggling with extreme situations, this is a book by which I was irresistibly gripped. I’m sure many others will find it no less compelling and enjoyable.

A compulsively readable tale, all the better for being set in one of the most secretive countries in the world. In The Sorcerer of Pyongyang, Marcel Theroux captures the extraordinary atmosphere of North Korean life with wit and insight

Compelling, mesmerising and eye-opening

Striking . . . Theroux mischievously crafts a pitiful, repellent character named Jimi, Kim Jong-un’s Westernised playboy brother

Reading The Sorcerer of Pyongyang is an informative and entertaining way to learn about North Korea. Theroux’s painstaking research intimately reveals the workings of North Korean society, in the public and private spheres . . . Theroux also writes with intelligence, compassion and an occasional quiet lyricism. Most crucially, the novel powerfully embodies the plight of North Koreans in the state’s vast shadow

Expert, engrossing…a remarkable bildungsroman…A cleverly imagined tale of psychic repression and escape from it