Marching Through Suffering is a deeply personal portrait of the ravages of famine and totalitarian politics in modern North Korea since the 1990s. Featuring interviews with more than thirty North Koreans who defected to Seoul and Tokyo, the book explores the subjective experience of the nation's famine and its citizens' social and psychological strategies for coping with the regime.

These oral testimonies show how ordinary North Koreans, from farmers and soldiers to students and diplomats, framed the mounting struggles and deaths surrounding them as the famine progressed. Following the development of the disaster, North Koreans deployed complex discursive strategies to rationalize the horror and hardship in their lives, practices that maintained citizens' loyalty to the regime during the famine and continue to sustain its rule today. Casting North Koreans as a diverse people with a vast capacity for adaptation rather than as a monolithic entity passively enduring oppression, Marching Through Suffering positions personal history as key to the interpretation of political violence.

"Subtly and sensitively, the author examines how people tried to cope with and make sense of their lives as they ran out of food in a society where words such as famine and starvation were taboo." - Times Literary Supplement

"A rich study of coping, resilience, hope, loss, and transition." - Human Rights Review

"Sandra Fahy's, Marching Through Suffering: Loss and Survival in North Korea, makes an original contribution to the literature on the 1990s famine in the Democratic People's Republic of Korea." - Human Rights Quarterly

"Sandra Fahy's fascinating work... achieves something of much depth and empirical utility to the scholar." - Pacific Affairs

"Fascinating... An important work that helps provide a far more nuanced view of the complexities of life in North Korea than that found in the media." - CHOICE

"What emerges is a people-centered story, a tale that empowers rather than victimizes. It is, the reviewers unequivocally conclude, a harrowing but powerful read." - Sino NK

"With its nuanced understanding of North Koreans and elegant prose, Fahy's work will certainly find a place on the syllabi of many future coures on North Korea." - BAKS Papers

"If you want to know why the human rights agenda matters, read this book and be reminded how complexly damaging state-led deprivation and oppression can be." - Peterson Institute for International Economics