The World Is Bigger Now: An American Journalist's Release from Captivity in North Korea

In this stunning first book, film editor Lee (for Current TV, the cable network cofounded by Al Gore) recounts the months she spent in a North Korean prison during the spring and summer of 2009. Lee and her coworker, Laura Ling, were arrested for entering North Korea from China while working on a documentary chronicling the dreadful privations faced by North Korean defectors once they reached China, conditions especially harsh for women, as many were sold into the sex trade or forced into marriage. Lee discusses in detail the time she and Ling spent in captivity, divulging the scare tactics employed by the guards, like all-day interrogations in an attempt to gain "suitable" confessions. Maintaining her sanity by thinking constantly of her family and praying in secret, Lee rises above illness and a looming 14-year prison sentence to paint a lucid self-portrait. (Sept.)