The Orphan Master's Son (Easton Press Signed Collector's Edition)

JOHNSON, Adam. The Orphan Master's Son. Norwalk, Connecticut: The Easton Press, 2013.

Octavo. Full burgundy leather. Spine with four raised bands, 22-carat gilt accents. Gilt lettering and design to covers. All edges gilt. Moiré silk endpapers. Satin ribbon page marker. 443 pp. Signed Collector's Edition. Signed by the author on the special signature page. Includes signed Certificate of Authenticity, edition card, and bookplate adhered to front endpaper. Originally published New York: Random House, 2012.

Adam Johnson (b. 1967) grew up in South Dakota and Arizona, took his MFA at McNeese State University in Louisiana, and is a professor of creative writing at Stanford University. The Orphan Master's Son was his second novel and won the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. It is, by some measure, the most ambitious and formally demanding novel ever written about North Korea — a country that does not easily yield to imaginative treatment, since so little of its interior life is visible to outsiders and the consequences of misrepresentation are not trivial. Johnson spent years researching the project, including a visit to Pyongyang itself, and what he produced is a work that holds its subject with unusual steadiness: neither satirising nor romanticising, but imagining with full seriousness the interior life of people formed by a system designed, at every level, to prevent them from having one.

The novel follows Pak Jun Do, an orphan raised in a state facility for children of political prisoners, who moves through a succession of roles in the North Korean apparatus — kidnapper, radio operator, tunnel fighter, military attaché, man of special operations — that together constitute a portrait of the regime from the inside. The first half of the novel is narrated in Pak Jun Do's own voice; the second half fractures into multiple perspectives, including the omniscient loudspeakers of state propaganda that narrate the official version of events even as those events unfold before the reader in their actual complexity. The formal invention is not decorative — it enacts, precisely, the condition of a society in which the official story and the lived experience exist in permanent, irreconcilable tension.

The novel won the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and was described by the prize committee as an "epic novel and a thrilling literary discovery." The New York Times called it "a daring, audacious, brilliantly imagined novel." It is the definitive literary account of one of the most opaque and troubling societies of the contemporary world.

Near fine. Some mild spotting along gilt edges; otherwise fine throughout.

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Catalogue Number: HH000540