I picked up 'A River in Darkness' as part of a prime first reads offer a while ago, and never got around to reading it before. I don't generally read memoirs, but I'd kept it on my kindle for a long time after reading a couple of reviews about how powerful it was. It turns out calling 'A River in Darkness' powerful is an understatement. This memoir isn't especially long, novella length at less than 200 pages, but every single part of it stayed with me and I found myself thinking about it for days. I don't know much about North Korea, I'll admit, and I didn't know anything about the so called 'repatriation' of Japanese citizens to North Korea so this was my first introduction to the things that happened during that time. This memoir broke my heart. The things that Masaji Ishikawa went through after being forced to move to North Korea were haunting and I will definitely be reading more memoirs after this one opened my eyes to atrocities happening that I didn't even know about and the way that people were being let down by their governments.