Books like Under the Black Umbrella by Hildi Kang

During World War II, a foster girl in Nazi Germany steals books to share with neighbors and a hidden Jewish man, proving literature’s power to nourish the soul amid darkness.

The Kite Runner follows an unlikely friendship between a privileged boy and the son of his father’s servant amid Afghanistan’s turbulent history, exploring betrayal, redemption, and the father‑son bond.

Sisters Vianne and Isabelle are pulled into the turmoil of World War II, each forging a path of courage and resistance against the Nazi occupation of France.

Pachinko follows a Korean family’s generations, from Sunja’s departure to Korea to her descendants’ struggles in Japan’s shifting social landscape, exploring love, sacrifice, and resilience.

447 pages : 24 cm

Both a shocking and moving portrayal of scenes of every day life in North Korea, a secretive and brutal nation. Hyok Kang writes of the public executions, of the labour camps and mines, the punishment for 'anti-social behaviour', the secret watching of Beijing television, and the spies everywhere who help enforce the regime by denouncing any deviations from the rigidly patrolled norm. And when the famine comes so too does death by starvation of friends and close ones, cannibalism, and political purge. All this is normal for Hyok Kang. After all, the propaganda North Koreans are fed by their government insists that compared to the rest of the world, this is paradise! Woven into this portrayal is the individual story of a boy who likes to draw - some of his accomplished illustrations are included in the book - and of his migration to China as an asylum seeker.

"The study of Korea during the colonial period (1910-45) has long been dominated by the nationalist paradigms of Japanese imperialist repression versus Korean nationalist resistance, colonial exploitation versus national development, and Japanese culture versus Korean culture. The twelve chapters in this volume seek to overcome the limitations of these binaries by adopting a more inclusive, pluralistic approach that stresses the complex relations among colonialism, modernity, and nationalism and sees them not as opposites but as a mutually reinforcing web of relations that continues to influence Korea today."--BOOK JACKET.