This is the incredible story of Shin Dong-hyuk - the only person born in a North Korean gulag ever to escape. A gripping, terrifying biography, Escape from Camp 14 by journalist Blaine Harden uncovers a dark and secret nation.

Now a major documentary film.

'This is a story unlike any other' - Barbara Demick, author of Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea.

Twenty-seven years ago, Shin Dong-hyuk was born inside Camp 14, one of five sprawling political prisons in the mountains of North Korea. Located about fifty-five miles north of Pyongyang, the labour camp is a 'complete control district' - a no-exit prison where the only sentence is life.

No one born in Camp 14 or in any North Korean political prison camp has escaped. No one except Shin. This is his story . .

Introducing the incredible story of Shin Dong-hyuk - the only person born in a North Korean gulag ever to escape . . .

About the Author
Blaine Harden is a reporter for PBS Frontline and a contributor to the Economist, based in Seattle, having completed a tour as the Washington Post's bureau chief in Tokyo. He is the prize-winning, acclaimed author of two books: Africa: Dispatches from a Fragile Continent and A River Lost: The Life and Death of the Columbia and the author of Escape from Camp 14.

Reviews
This is a story unlike any other because Shin is one of the few, if not only, long-term prisoners to have escaped from the North Korean gulag . . . The integrity of this book, shines through on every page. -- Barbara Demick, author of Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea
'Harrowing . . . Harden's account of Shin's extraordinary, perilous journey through North Korea and into China (which has a history of sending asylum seekers back to North Korea) and later to South Korea is gripping stuff . . . bearing witness will be Shin's legacy' Daily Mail
'Harden sheds light on the horrors of North Korea, with a gripping account of the story of Shin In Geun' Financial Times - Favourite Books of 2012
'Until recently, full accounts of life in this famine-riven dystopia were hard to come by. Then a couple of years ago, Barbara Demick's Nothing to Envy provided excoriating testimonies of refugees who had managed to escape into China and then on to South Korea. The picture those witnesses drew of North Korea was of one vast and brutal gulag. Now comes Escape From Camp 14, a still more harrowing account of the gulag within the gulag, the huge prison camps that litter the more remote provinces of this benighted country. Written by Blaine Harden, an experienced American journalist, it tells the extraordinary story of Shin Dong-hyuk, the only person born in the gulag to have escaped' Guardian
'Harden knows a lot about North Korea and he wears his knowledge lightly . . . Harden deserves a lot more than 'wow' for this terrifying, grim and, at the very end, slightly hopeful story of a damaged man still alive only by chance, whose life, even in freedom, has been dreadful' Literary Review
Harrowing story of a young man's flight from one of the slave labor camps where as many as 200,000 political unreliables - a category that includes not just those who run afoul of authority but their relatives for three generations - are sent to be starved, tortured and ultimately worked to death. Harden's book, besides being a gripping story, unsparingly told, carries a freight of intelligence about this black hole of a country' * New York Times *
'A skilfully researched piece of book-length journalism uncluttered, as far as seems reasonable, with emotion. It is old now, the saying that for evil to exist, good men must do nothing. And that is what you take away, more than anything, from Harden's book. More than why the crimes against humanity are happening in the first place, more than whose responsibility it is to stop them, the question is why - for the sake not of politics but of mankind - is nobody in power doing anything about it?' Spectator
In depicting the depravity of North Korean prison life, Harden's book is an important portrait of man's inhumanity to man' Washington Post



Book Information
ISBN 9780330519540
Author Blaine Harden
Format Paperback
Page Count 288
Imprint Pan Books
Publisher Pan Macmillan
Weight(grams) 196g
Dimensions(mm) 197mm * 131mm * 18mm