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Cover of The Girl with Seven Names by Hyeonseo Lee

The Girl with Seven Names

  • 304 pages · about 5 hours
  • First published 2015
  • 7 editions

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1 About this book

An extraordinary insight into life under one of the world’s most ruthless and secretive dictatorships – and the story of one woman’s terrifying struggle to avoid capture/repatriation and guide her family to freedom.

As a child growing up in North Korea, Hyeonseo Lee was one of millions trapped by a secretive and brutal communist regime. Her home on the border with China gave her some exposure to the world beyond the confines of the Hermit Kingdom and, as the famine of the 1990s struck, she began to wonder, question and to realise that she had been brainwashed her entire life. Given the repression, poverty and starvation she witnessed surely her country could not be, as she had been told “the best on the planet”?

Aged seventeen, she decided to escape North Korea. She could not have imagined that it would be twelve years before she was reunited with her family.

Good for readers who want: a true life story and history.

  • Biography
  • History
  • Korea, biography
  • Korea, social conditions
  • Women, biography
  • Defectors
  • Communism
  • Social conditions

2 About Hyeonseo Lee

Born 1980

Lee Hyeon-seo (Korean: 이현서, born January 1980), best known for her book, The Girl with Seven Names, is a North Korean defector and activist who lives in Seoul, South Korea. She escaped from North Korea and later guided her family out of North Korea through China and Laos.

Bio adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0)

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