Anyone who reads the news or has logged onto social media is aware of the cult of personality around North Korea’s Kim dynasty. From afar, it’s almost cartoonish, with the bronze statues and the funny haircuts and the penchant for nuclear threats. But examined up close, it’s remarkable—almost breathtaking—in its intensity, in its durability, and, perhaps most strikingly, in its religiosity.
When I first started covering North Korea for The Wall Street Journal more than a decade ago, I was perplexed to learn that Kim Il Sung, the state founder, had been born and raised in a devout Presbyterian family, on the outskirts of a city, Pyongyang, that was so thoroughly Christianized that it was known as the “Jerusalem of the East.” I wondered whether there might have been some connection between Kim’s upbringing in the church and the religiosity of the personality cult that he constructed.
Over the course of twelve years of research and writing, the evidence was, to my mind, unmistakable. Along the way, I realized just how much Kim Il Sung and the broader fate of the North Korean people are woven into the story of modern Korea—in all of its many tragedies, from feudal decay to Japanese colonization to division and civil war. It’s a magnificent story, albeit one full of heartbreak and pain.
Here are five books that were essential to my understanding of the story.
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Barbara Demick, Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea
(Random House)
This work of narrative non-fiction is rightly hailed as the best work on North Korea’s devastating famine of the 1990s, which coincided with Kim Il Sung’s death in 1994. Here, Demick tells the story of Kim Il Sung’s 25 million subjects through the personal tales of just a few of them, bringing to life not only the tragedy of North Korea’s most difficult period, but also underscoring the power of the Kim family personality cult even at a moment when it seemed all was lost.
Richard E. Kim, Lost Names: Scenes from a Korean Boyhood
(University of California Press)
This collection of thinly veiled autobiographical vignettes from a pioneering Korean American author offers a visceral, ground-level view of what it felt like to live under Japanese colonial rule as a Korean, and what it meant to see Korea liberated—only to then see it divided. Told with tenderness and empathy, this evocative collection of stories from a third-generation Korean Christian writer captures the feelings of nationalism and shame that animated Kim Il Sung.
Richard E. Kim, The Martyred
(Penguin)
Richard E. Kim’s breakthrough novel tells the morally complex story of fourteen church ministers captured during the Korean War. Twelve of them are executed on the banks of Pyongyang’s Taedong River, and the advancing South Korean forces want to turn them into martyrs. But an investigation into the two survivors raises questions about whether they betrayed their faith to avoid execution. The reality is far more complicated and gets to the heart of the themes propelling this now-forgotten New York Times bestseller, as well as Korean Messiah: faith, nationalism, guilt, and truth in the face of unimaginable death and destruction.
Masaji Ishikawa, A River in Darkness: One Man’s Escape from North Korea
(Amazon Crossing)
In recent decades, dozens of harrowing memoirs have been written by North Koreans who fled the country. But there’s a unique power to the accounts of overseas Koreans who accepted Pyongyang’s repatriation campaign in the 1960s. The horror of discovering that Kim Il Sung’s socialist paradise was anything but—and knowing what they had given up in their previous lives—only raises the moral stakes of the decision to flee. Like Kang Chol-hwan’s better known Aquariums of Pyongyang: Ten Years in the North Korean Gulag (English translation 2001), the life story of Masaji Ishikawa—the pseudonym of a half-Korean, half-Japanese boy born just outside of postwar Tokyo—is a compelling if distressing read.
Julia Scheeres, A Thousand Lives: The Untold Story of Jonestown
(Free Press)
The one selection on this list from outside the world of North Korea comes from the jungles of Guyana—though even there, Kim Il Sung’s presence could be felt. Rev. Jim Jones adopted three Korean children, praised Kim Il Sung over the loudspeakers at Jonestown, sent his team to meet with North Korean officials, and even considered relocating Jonestown to Pyongyang. Though many accounts have been written of what happened at Jonestown, A Thousand Lives is a recent, more accessible entry point into the most unsettling episode involving a religious society in recent memory, offering a look into how personality cults like those of Jones and Kim are constructed and how they take hold.
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Jonathan Cheng’s Korean Messiah: Kim Il Sung and the Christian Roots of North Korea’s Personality Cult, a finalist for the 2026 Cundill History Prize, is available now.