Books like This is paradise! by Hy*ok Kang

Aldous Huxley's 1932 masterpiece presents a dystopian future shaped by genetic engineering, conditioned society, and an oppressive, consumerist regime, raising urgent questions about ethics, control, and the loss of individuality.

Pride and Prejudice is a classic novel by Jane Austen.

Ernest Hemingway’s classic follows an old Cuban fisherman and his young companion as they battle a massive marlin, exploring themes of endurance, solitude, and the human struggle against nature.

Harper Lee’s 1960 classic follows young Scout Finch in Depression‑era Alabama as her father, lawyer Atticus Finch, defends a black man accused of rape, confronting racism, prejudice, and the moral growth of a child.

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s masterpiece examines the glittering yet hollow glamour of the Roaring Twenties as the enigmatic Jay Gatsby pursues love, wealth, and identity across the social divide.

A nonfiction novel chronicling the adventures of a group of friends on their cross-country journey of discovery, featuring characters like Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty as real-life friends Neal Casady.

The Bell Jar is the sole novel by Sylvia Plath, a psychologically intense and autobiographical look at a young woman’s decline into mental illness.

Between the World and Me is a memoir‑essay in letter form, where Ta‑Nehisi Coates addresses his teenage son about the history, violence, and ongoing reality of being Black in America.

Ernest Hemingway’s Louisiana‑born narrator takes readers through the 1920s Lost Generation—expatriates on Paris’s Left Bank, bullfights in Spain, and the era’s moral and spiritual unraveling.

Posthumously published, Hemingway’s *A Moveable Feast* is a memoir of his Paris years in the 1920s, detailing his early career, intimate relationships, and encounters with other literary figures of the Lost Generation.

A powerful memoir of John Bul Dau’s escape from the Sudanese civil war as a Lost Boy, his 1,000‑mile exile to Ethiopia and Kenya, and his later life rebuilding in the United States.

In her diary, Mary Boykin Chesnut, the wife of a Confederate general and aid to president Jefferson Davis, James Chestnut, Jr., presents an eyewitness account of the Civil War.

A compelling look at the rise and fall of the Fox sisters and the birth of Spiritualism in America, blending historical narrative with supernatural elements.

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.