Splinters

Just been sent a copy of Jeff Talarigo's The Ginseng Hunter. Set on the Chinese border with North Korea, Talarigo spent time camping on the border to experience it for himself and interviewing North Korean refugees. I very much like the idea of novelists getting involved in history that's happening right now and drawing out the consequences for those actually caught up in it. A former journalist, Talarigo's next novel will be about the Palestinians, so clearly he agrees (more info on his own website).

Here's the blurb about The Ginseng Hunter from Publisher's Weekly from the Amazon page:

Set on China's fraught, ruggedly beautiful border with North Korea, Talarigo's tense, atmospheric second novel (after The Pearl Diver) movingly dramatizes the human faces behind political oppression. A nameless middle-aged Chinese man—whose mother was Chinese and father was Korean—maintains a quiet, relatively stable life gathering the valuable ginseng root. In strict adherence to family traditions, he takes only a single root a day when he can find them; once a month he stays overnight in the city of Yanji, at Miss Wong's bordello. On one such trip, he spends the night with a young North Korean refugee who tells a harrowing story of oppression. Alternating with her story is the tale of a North Korean mother and young daughter who are forcibly separated during famine; the daughter washes up tragically at the gatherer's door, while the mother might or might not be the refugee prostitute. Talarigo hypnotically weaves the strands of these stories together against a backdrop of stunning scenery and of cruelty, creating a memorable, morally stringent tale.

I would also recommend Under The Loving Care Of The Fatherly Leader, Bradley Martin's monumental history of North Korea and Guy Delisle’s graphic novel Pyongyang which I reviewed previously on my Asian travel site Travelhappy.