Adam Johnson’s The Orphan Master’s Son, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction this year, is a fascinating novel that appears to have tremendous insight into its setting, North Korea—that geopolitical blind spot always ready to react with threats of nuclear deployment. North Korea may be the most important country in the world that we understand least, and while Johnson’s book is hardly a political science textbook or a cultural history, it is a moving narrative that attains an intimacy with its subjects and setting that other sources might not be able to.

The book is divided into two parts. The first chronicles the adventures of a young man (the son of a man who runs an orphanage) as he is drafted into service on behalf of the state, going on missions to kidnap people in Japan (including, in a particularly intense scene, a young opera singer sought after by Pyongyang), and working as a signal operator on a boat. The first half of the book is well written, though somewhat slow; like the place it evokes, I found this book difficult to enter. The story soon starts to build, however, eventually becoming a gripping story about a place where it is often hard to separate mythology from news.

The book’s second half builds on the achievement of the first, rounding out the novel in what can only be described as a masterly stroke of storytelling. The appearance of the Dear Leader (King Jong Il) is both chilling and thought-provoking, as, unlike many portraits of the man, it does not satirize the hyperbolic nature of his own self-mythologizing; Johnson offers a new, more gripping depiction of one of history’s cruelest tyrants.

This is an exceptional book in many aspects, one that will appeal to those interested in international politics, or, for that matter, the struggle people face in the potentially dehumanizing context of a totalitarian political culture.