“If you try to talk about North Korea in Asia, a lot of people just sort of shake their heads as if everyone there [is] a bit crazy—a don’t-worry-about-it sort of thing. And that piqued my interest.”

So it was, Harry Allen tells Kirkus by Zoom from his home in Dubai, that he decided to visit what is perhaps the most hermetic and, certainly, most thoroughly policed country on Earth.

“I’d read a few nonfiction accounts of life in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea,” he continues. “These stories were true, and I had no reason to doubt them, but it just seemed a very odd thing that this sort of society still existed in the world.”

An experienced world traveler—born in the U.K., he’s resided outside his homeland most of his life—Allen knew that it was difficult to get into North Korea. There were forms to be filled out, documents to be scrutinized, background checks to be made. And then there was the simple fact of getting there, period: one could fly in from Moscow, Beijing, or Kuala Lumpur, or, as Allen elected to do, take the train from China. “I chose the train because the National Airline of North Korea didn’t have [a] great safety rating,” he says.

The train exposed Allen to two opposed sets of images: grim vignettes of rural and industrial life along the rails, such as a woman gathering water from a trackside puddle to haul to a nearby concrete-block apartment building, and the profound beauty of the mountainous, heavily forested nation, much of it still wilderness.

“The guy who prepared the trip for me said, ‘You’re going to go back in time,’” Allen recalls. “I did. When I crossed the border, I was met by two government agents who were always with me unless I was in my hotel room. Along with the government guides, they constantly sang the praises of North Korea’s leaders, which was the real agenda. But one day they took me to a school. It was dark and cold because the electricity was out, but three young women sang for me. Their voices were incredible. I had asked one of the guides how she got the job, and she said when you get to a certain age you can write down three things you might like to do, and the government decides which, if any of them, is one you can do.”

Divine voices, government repression to the point of determining your life’s course: For Allen, who has mostly made his living teaching English to international students, these began to jell into the makings of a story. “What if you’re a young singer in North Korea? Where do you go? Who decides if you can sing?” He pondered those questions on what he says was a thoroughly depressing return trip to China, then back to Singapore, where he lived at the time. He thought about it for years as he traveled the world.

“Eventually it all sort of clicked into place,” he says, “with three friends who find a radio and are exposed to a world that they’ve only heard whispers about. They get into terrible trouble because of that.”

That, in the barest of bare bones outlines, describes Allen’s novel Children of the Sun, which received a Kirkus star in the Indie category, our reviewer praising it as “a very moving and powerful celebration of courage in the face of inhumanity.” Think of it as One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich for a different time but similar place: A brutal prison camp populated by artists, intellectuals, writers, and other unfortunates who’ve been caught up in a system that doesn’t really care what it chews up and spits out; cruelty and torture take the place of the “re-education” that is its supposed purpose. Ra Eun Sea, a young woman with big dreams, is especially entranced by the radio, found while foraging for food in the woods. For that, denounced by neighborhood spies—for every totalitarian regime relies on volunteers—she is sent to the North Korean gulag with two friends, Min and Seo, whose only crime is nurturing unapproved dreams of their own and listening to unapproved voices from south of the Demilitarized Zone.

Allen interweaves a few—beg pardon—red herrings into the tale, but prison camp politics often play out in sad episodes of inexplicable cruelty, as when one of Seo’s teachers, loyal to the regime, is executed without having the slightest idea of what crime he has committed. Like that of a young Red Guard at the start of Liu Cixin’s The Three-Body Problem, his body is left to twist in the wind for days, as if to warn: This is who we are, we rulers, and we obey no rules other than our own—if those.

Allen is no stranger to writing. With a degree in theater, he began to write a play about Nigeria, where he had lived as a child. “It didn’t work as a play,” he says, “so I started again and wrote it as a novel. It took me a long time. Writing is a real process, a real craft, and I went through many, many drafts. Finally, it got picked up by a publisher in the U.K. and was published as Ibarajo Road in 2012.” The YA novel received generally good reviews, but when it came time to release Children of the Sun into the world, Allen decided to publish it himself, discouraged by his agent’s sense that writers need to stay in their so-called cultural lanes. “I’m not quite sure what my cultural background is anymore,” he says. “Having worked internationally so long, you know, with 150 different nationalities of kids, I identify as a global citizen.”

Having lived and worked in Mauritius, Nigeria, Singapore, Dubai, and many points beyond, Allen takes that internationalism seriously. “One thing I’ve learned living overseas for so long, working with international students, is that there’s an awful lot more that we have in common than we don’t have in common. We are very much united, I think, by a common humanity. The idea that young people in North Korea somehow suffer in different ways or respond to suffering and grief and pain and hope and loss in different ways to someone living in Brazil strikes me as a very alien concept, and that’s one thing that I kept in mind as I wrote.”

Suffering is everywhere, to be sure. But it wasn’t so many years ago that famine was taking the lives of untold thousands of North Koreans, even as the grandees of the regime grew as stout as Animal Farm’s Napoleon. The Kim dynasty retains its hold on the nation, inflicting untold pain while assuring its citizens that South Korea, a “puppet regime” of the United States, is the real danger—and that Kim Jong Un, known in his homeland as the “Shining Sun,” is the only one who can protect his children. With its many insights into that little-known land, informed by hard-won knowledge and an empathetic imagination, Harry Allen’s Children of the Sun is a memorable guide.

Gregory McNamee is a contributing writer.