STANDALONE
THE LIMITS OF THE WORLD
In Pyongyang, North Korea, a lonely government official’s passion for banned foreign books drives him to acts of startling heroism and rebellion.
Mr Han is a guide to foreign tourists visiting the North Korean capital of Pyongyang. On the surface, he appears to be a model citizen, repeating the official version of history as written by the all-powerful, totalitarian government.
But unknown to anyone, Han has been living a dangerous, double-life as a passionate reader of banned foreign books, and dreams of a life outside the brutal regime.
Now a passionate affair with enigmatic cellist Mae will drive Han to do the unthinkable: risk his life by telling the truth about the regime to two undercover Western journalists, laying bare the wounds of his – and his country’s – deeply tragic past.
But Han’s secret life is about to unravel in ways he never anticipated. In his longing to find the freedom and love he has only ever read about, Han will discover the true price of freedom, and the human spirit’s power to conjure hope in the most hopeless of places.
From the author of Amazon bestseller Official Secrets – over 100k copies sold, millions of Kindle Unlimited pages read, and thousands of five-star reviews – comes a novel of soaring imagination, painstaking research, and breathtaking observation.
It is a novel for our times, and a reminder of the universal power of storytelling.
Perfect for fans of All The Light We Cannot See, The Beekeeper of Aleppo, Where The Crawdads Sing, and is a particularly great choice for book groups.
A BBC RADIO SCOTLAND Book of the Week.
SUNDAY TIMES ‘NOTABLE NEW FICTION’
SCOTLAND ON SUNDAY ‘BEST NEW FICTION’
‘A bold new voice, wise beyond his years.’ Ewan Morrison
‘His expert turn of phrase is lean and nuanced.’ Gutter Magazine
‘Clever without being showy, this is mature and accomplished writing.’ The Big Issue
What readers say...
The DPRK is such an unknown, certainly to me and I initially thought that the subject would be too heavy. I needn’t have worried because I loved the book from the first page. I was haunted by the story, the bleakness of the country, the apparent acceptance of the regime and the terror of discovery from real or imagined crimes.
All the characters were so well drawn I really felt I knew them and cared about what happened to them.
For the first time ever a book moved me to tears.
I highly recommend The Limits Of The World.
A surprising book to be linked with the others by Andrew Raymond. Well worth sticking with though. The prose is beautiful. The story is sad but uplifting & the insight into loneliness profound. It would be interesting to know how they cope with the next stage of their lives.
I happened on this book after reading all of Andrew Raymond’s thrillers which I had enjoyed immensely. I read it compulsively, even greedily and finished it in a 24 hour period. It couldn’t have been more different from the writer’s other books but was almost perfect in its conception and totally relatable in its telling. The parallels drawn between the situation in Orwell’s 1984 and the current climate in North Korea were striking. However, this was not a political treatise but a story of one man’s desperate attempt to make sense of his lot, and, on finding that it was senseless, his decision to break free. Despite the disconnect between the rest of the world and North Korea, all the characters were believable although the North Korean military were understandably more one dimensional. I thoroughly recommend it to anyone who has read 1984 or has a predilection for dystopian novels.