“A great novel can take implausible fact and turn it into entirely believable fiction. That’s the genius of The Orphan Master’s Son. Adam Johnson has taken the papier-mâché creation that is North Korea and turned it into a real and riveting place that readers will find unforgettable. This is a novel worth getting excited about, one which more than delivers on its pre-publication buzz . . . I haven’t liked a new novel this much in years, and I want to share the simple pleasure of reading the book. But I also think it’s an instructive lesson in how to paint a fictional world against a background of fact: The secret is research . . . It’s this process of re-imagination that makes the fictional locale so real and gives the novel an impact you could never achieve with a thousand newspaper stories. Johnson has painted in indelible colors the nightmare of Kim’s North Korea. When English readers want to understand what it was about—how people lived and died inside a cult of personality that committed unspeakable crimes against its citizens—I hope they will turn to this carefully documented story. The happy surprise is that they will find it such a page turner.” —The Washington Post

“All of these elements—stylistic panache, technical daring, moral weight and an uncanny sense of the current moment—combine in Adam Johnson's The Orphan Master's Son, the single best work of fiction published in 2012 . . . The book's cunning, flair and pathos are testaments to the still-formidable power of the written word.” —The Wall Street Journal

“Adam Johnson . . . is gifted with a delightful, vibrant and occasionally all-encompassing vision. His Parasites Like Us is a strange, remarkable novel that is hilarious and infused with sparklingly imaginative and vivid detail—part love story, part midlife crisis, part anthropological treatise and part futuristic science fiction.” —St. Louis Post-Dispatch