Suki Kim recounts her life in North Korea. In 2011, all universities in the country were shut down, apart from the all-male Pyongyang University of Science and Technology. Kim taught English there, struggling to teach her young charges to write, all under the watchful eye of the regime. This provides a rare insight into a secretive totalitarian nation.

Her letters are read by censors, and she must hide her notes and photographs not only from her minders but also from her colleagues, evangelical Christian missionaries, whose faith she does not share.