Review: A Dream of Lights, Kerry Drewery

North Korea is one of the most secretive countries in the world. We sort of know some things about it - the fact that it is a communist state run on the cult of personality and the immediate squashing of any dissent. We also know that most of its population is imprisoned. We don't know, however, just how brutal the conditions really are for the people who live there, whether they are free or not.

This novel, though fiction, is based on extensive research from survivors and advocacy groups. I think it is essential reading but not one that you would pick up again and again.

Yoora is a teenager who lives in a small village in North Korea. Technically, her family is free but they may as well not be from the conditions they live in. However, she starts to dream of strange things - bright lights and music in a faraway city. When she tells her family, they immediately become fearful and make her promise to never tell anyone of her dream.

However, she soon means a boy called Sook, whose mother is essentially an informer for the government - this is known. She meets him secretly every night and falls in love with him.

Until he betrays her.

She and her grandparents are banished to a prison camp. Her father is executed, her mother is sent to the city of her birth. To give you an idea of how bad these prison camps are, just remember what you learned about concentration camps during the Holocaust, and you'll start to get an idea.

Yoora never gives up hope, though. She is rewarded eventually for her hope, though I won't say how.

This book is a kind of adrenaline rush from beginning to end, but not in the same way as an action novel. It's emotionally exhausting, which is testament to how well-written the story is. Everything that happens in this book is based on a combination of real-life stories. It's just unimaginable in our comfortable, Western existence to think how people the same age as us, on the other side of the world, spend their lives in fear and terror, knowing one misstep, one misspoken words, can mean they spend the rest of their lives in prison.

This book is essential reading, not because it is pleasant, but because the reality of the lives of millions of North Koreans deserves to be known.