Misery and death: The lot of N. Koreans

Jun-sang's breaking point comes when he hears a young waif, cold and soaked from the rain, singing for money at a train station. It's a patriotic song that gives the book its title: "Our father is here," the child sings, referring to Kim Jong-Il, North Korea's dictator. "We have nothing to envy."

Disgusted by the regime or driven by hunger, the characters individually make their way north to China. They hire smugglers to help them ford frigid rivers along the border at the risk of imprisonment or execution. Oak-hee, a rebellious mother and wife, leaves her family behind in Chongjin. In exchange for help crossing into China, she marries a farmer there, with whom she lives for two years.

Using forged passports, the characters eventually make their way to South Korea, a nation with which they share a language and almost nothing else. After a lifetime under totalitarian rule, early attempts to adapt to a free-wheeling capitalist society are predictably painful.

But they are free to speak at last, and Barbara Demick is there to listen - and bring their stories to us.

Frank Langfitt is a business correspondent for NPR. From 1997 to 2002, he was the Baltimore Sun's Beijing bureau chief and covered South Korea.