I'll admit that it took me a little while to get into this novel and had I not been traveling, I'm not sure I would have finished it so quickly. However, despite the slower start, somewhere along the way I became absolutely hooked to the edge of my seat and by the end, I couldn't turn the pages fast enough. Incredibly well written and clearly well researched, Adam Johnson's masterwork of a novel reminded me of some of great masterpieces and brilliant writers of the Soviet era I love--Solzhenitsyn, Chukovskaya, or Babel--although perhaps this was a reflection of the content and structure as much as the writing itself.

This is a disturbing book. It is dark, violent, cruel, and the strange twists and turns, the horrors of the plot as it moves back and forth in time, and the mysterious journey that Jun Do ("John Doe") takes over the course of the novel is difficult to read at times. Yet the novel brings to life a country often experienced as nothing more than a broad abstraction and makes for an imaginative, expansive, beautiful piece of fiction that has a fantastical and magical quality that is somehow still also rooted in reality. Stunning.