Satellite view of two Koreas at night.

Satellite view of two Koreas at night.

THE world scanned the closely guarded funeral for North Korean leader Kim Jong-il this week, seeking clues about the politics of the most closed society on Earth. But readers looking for insight into North Korea have better options.

The most acclaimed recent book on the country is Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea by Barbara Demick, a foreign correspondent for The Los Angeles Times. It was a finalist for the 2010 US National Book Award and took home the Samuel Johnson Prize in Britain.

In his review of the book in The New York Times, Dwight Garner wrote: ''Ms Demick's book is a lovely work of narrative non-fiction, one that follows the lives of six ordinary North Koreans, including a female doctor, a pair of star-crossed lovers, a factory worker and an orphan. It's a book that offers extensive evidence of the author's deep knowledge of this country while keeping its sights firmly on individual stories and human details.''

In the same review, he considered The Hidden People of North Korea: Everyday Life in the Hermit Kingdom by Ralph Hassig and Kongdan Oh, saying it was ''wonkier than Ms Demick's and less reader friendly, but it covers more ground''. He wrote that the book, based on more than 200 interviews with defectors, ''paints a picture of a restless populace, increasingly dubious about the official propaganda''.

Bradley K. Martin's Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader: North Korea and the Kim Dynasty, published in 2004, draws on extensive reporting in North Korea to portray the country and the father-son dictator team of Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il. Writing in The New York Review of Books, New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof said it was ''simply the best book ever written'' about North Korea. ''Relying largely on extensive interviews with defectors,'' Kristof wrote, ''Martin portrays North Korean life with a clarity that is stunning, and he captures the paradoxes in North Korean public opinion.''

The most rare and therefore most riveting books might be insider accounts of living in the country, such as The Aquariums of Pyongyang by defector Kang Chol-hwan. US president George W. Bush praised the book and met with its author; Christopher Hitchens, in a piece for Slate, wrote that it ''ought to be much more famous than it is''.

He continued, ''Given what everyday life in North Korea is like, I don't have sufficient imagination to guess what life in its prison system must be, but this book gives one a hint.'' In Long Road Home, Kim Yong details his six years in a North Korean labour camp. Hyok Kang's memoir This Is Paradise! recounts his childhood in North Korea before he and his family escaped to China. In a piece for The Telegraph of London, Kang began: ''I was nine when I saw my first execution.''

If first-person accounts are too harrowing, perhaps viewing the country through the lens of fiction would help. Kristof has recommended the Inspector O series of novels, which are set in Pyongyang and were written by a US intelligence expert on North Korea who uses the pseudonym James Church.

The novels ''beautifully capture the attitudes of the North Korean officials I've met'', Kristof wrote. In January, novelist Adam Johnson will publish The Orphan Master's Son, about a young man in North Korea who becomes complicit in the state's crimes and falls in love with an actress. Johnson has described the book, which will be available in Australia in March, as ''a sort of North Korean Casablanca''.

But for readers most interested in hearing from the horse's mouth, Kim Jong-il left behind several books of his own, including Life and Literature, in which he argued, ''Literature must show people as they are.'' Sellers on Amazon have copies available of Kim's On the Art of the Cinema and On the Art of the Opera.

NEW YORK TIMES