At seventeen, Hyeonseo Lee knew little of the world beyond North Korea's borders. Although something sensed. Unlike her fellow citizens, trapped, like her, under a ferocious dictatorship, her home, situated along the Chinese border, allowed her some glimpse of what lay beyond. So when famine hit the country in the mid-1990s, Hyeonseo began to wonder. She lived surrounded by repression, poverty and hunger: without a doubt her country could not be, as she had always been told, "the best on the planet", right? A unique insight into life under one of the world's most ruthless dictatorships, and one woman's struggle to lead her family to freedom. interesting story,