Twenty-six years ago, Shin Dong-hyuk was born inside Camp 14, one of five sprawling political prisons in the mountains of North Korea. Located about 55 miles north of Pyongyang, the labor camp is a 'complete control district,' a no-exit prison where the only sentence is life. Inmates work 12 to 15-hour days in the camp – mining coal, building dams, sewing military uniforms – until they are executed, killed in work-related accidents or die of illness that is usually triggered by hunger. No one born in Camp 14 or in any North Korean political prison camp has escaped.

No one except Shin.

This is his story.

A gripping, terrifying memoir with a searing sense of place, Escape from Camp 14 will unlock, through Shin, a dark and secret nation, taking readers to a place they have never before been allowed to go.

‘This is a story unlike any other . . . More so than any other book on North Korea, including my own, Escape from Camp 14 exposes the cruelty that is the underpinning of Kim Jong Il’s regime . . . The integrity of this book shines through on every page’—Barbara Demick, author of Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea