Theroux's fiction searches for hope in the most oppressive environments; National Book Award finalist Far North illuminated the beauty of life on a post-environmental collapse planet. Here Theroux turns his attention to the transformative power of narrative within the repressive political regime of North Korea. Set in the 1990s, the novel follows the maturation of a young boy named Cho Jun-su, a promising student and obedient citizen. A chance encounter with a Dungeons and Dragons rulebook opens him up to an imaginative world of possibilities that gains him popularity among his friends and the ire of the Ministry of State Security. Much like the roll of 12-sided dice, his life becomes a game of chance as he is subjected to imprisonment and inexplicably rises to the inner circle of the Supreme Leader. VERDICT Recalling Adam Johnson's The Orphan Master's Son, this intriguing new work from Theroux plunges readers into a dystopian North Korea and extracts the emotional complexity of a single life intended to be lived as a secondary character within its state ideology.--Joshua Finnell

Theroux (The Secret Books) delivers a humorous yet insightful take on the lives of ordinary North Koreans with the story of a boy whose life is transformed by Dungeons & Dragons. In 1995 Wonsan, North Korea, 11-year-old Cho Jun-su discovers a copy of the Dungeon Master's Guide, which cracks open a fantastical world for him. Later, while at university in Pyongyang, he develops a romance with the pretty and worldly Su-ok, who goes on to marry Kim Jimi, the supreme leader's older son. In 2003, Jun-su is arrested and sent to a penal colony for playing D&D, and Su-ok secures his release via Jimi's connections. Jun-su befriends Jimi (named after Jimi Hendrix), and through their friendship, as well as what he learns from the game, which he calls the "House of Possibility," Jun-su gains the courage to build a life on his own terms. As Jun-su, Su-ok, and Jimi strive to be more than mere "NPCs" (non-player characters in D&D), they retain a belief in the state's ideologies. It's frustrating that Theroux never resolves this underlying tension, though continued references to the game shed light on Jun-su and his friends' understanding of the world: "We are not real, but what we do to each other is real." This entertains and edifies in equal measure. (Nov.)

In 1991, a white American professor and his son visit North Korea as part of an organized delegation of academics. The son forgets a book under his hotel bed: the Dungeon Master's Guide, the rulebook for the fantasy role-playing game, Dungeons and Dragons. The book makes its way through the hotel staff to the junior chef's son, Cho Jun-su. The Dungeon Master's Guide comes to define Jun-su's coming of age in North Korea. In his third novel, Theroux (Strange Bodies, 2014) follows Jun-su as D & D shapes his life. He lives through the famine known as the Arduous March, sees his teacher executed for spying, and performs in a poetry competition for Kim Jong-il. As Jung-su matures to adulthood and attends university in Pyongyang, the intellectual freedoms he finds in being a Dungeon Master start to bring risk into his life. Theroux's writing relies on first-person accounts from North Korean escapees. A switch in narrator after the peak of Jun-su's story is jarring but does not distract from the novel's insight into the humanity of an isolated nation.

An illicit Dungeons & Dragons manual sparks a revolution within a young North Korean. Cho Jun-su, the hero of Theroux's expert, engrossing seventh novel, is 11 when he fatefully discovers a copy of a Dungeon Masters Guide--a foreign visitor left it behind at the hotel where Jun-su's father works. Jun-su is frightened by the book's inscrutable contents--foreign media is suspect under the dictatorship's iron rule--but he begins to decipher the book with the help of an English-speaking teacher, who dubs the game the House of Possibility. D & D's core concepts of assuming different roles and having multiple life choices are baffling but inspiring for the young man, who soon gets attention for his inventive poetry--work that in time introduces him to the nation's elite. Theroux offers a cross section of North Korean society, from brutal work camps where assassinations are common to the wealthy, druggy orbit of Kim Jong Il's friends and family to the desperate efforts of bureaucrats to cadge money for its starving people via ransomware and insurance fraud. But the heart of the story is consistently Jun-su, who navigates the traditional matters of maturity--love, sex, friendship--alongside a growing understanding of opportunities and mindsets that his friends and family aren't privy to. (When his D & D knowledge is discovered, he becomes both an object of fascination for academics and a target for persecution.) That makes the novel a remarkable bildungsroman; here, identity is both blossoming and severely suppressed. (As Theroux writes. "How did someone created by one reality begin to operate by the rules of another?") Theroux's deliberately flat, investigative-reporter tone clarifies the crisis--Jun-su is in a society stripped of anything decadent, and Theroux lets the twists of Jun-su's adventure, not the prose, sell the story. A cleverly imagined tale of psychic repression and escape from it. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.