As a 17-year-old, she sneaks across the border, “thrilled” by the idea of a holiday with relatives in China. She stays on, working as an interpreter and living with her “flawless” South Korean boyfriend. She requests asylum by hopping on a plane to Seoul. But everything goes wrong when her mother and brother’s escape lands them in a Laotian jail.

One tragedy of North Korea, Lee writes, is that “everyone wears a mask,” a necessity in a society with mandatory weekly criticism sessions, even for children. Lee’s own masks are her seven names, seven different identities. Even in exile, those masks are never really peeled away, leaving an emptiness at the heart of her story.

STARS BETWEEN THE SUN AND MOON

One Woman’s Life in North Korea and Escape to Freedom

By Lucia Jang and Susan McClelland

280 pp. Norton, $26.95.

On the misery index, Jang’s book receives a solid 10/10. She charts her disastrous first marriage to an abusive, unfaithful, debt-ridden alcoholic, who — aided by her own mother — secretly sells their baby for 300 won and two bars of soap. She flees to China, where she herself is sold to “the village idiot.” She escapes, but is so crazed with hunger she trades sex for a single meal. She is twice caught and sent to North Korean prisons, once while pregnant, when she is informed the baby will be killed. Finally, she smuggles herself and her infant son through China and Mongolia to freedom in Canada.

Jang evokes childhood in 1970s North Korea with memories of her “one and only toy,” a piece of string that she twisted into shapes until it fell apart. Her schooling consists of criticism sessions and acting as unpaid farm labor for four months every year. Yet Jang survives with her compassion unscathed. In jail, she shares her scarce rations with cellmates, asking in return for pledges to reunite outside North Korea. Such a show of humanity in an utterly inhuman environment lifts her tale of extraordinary suffering.

UNDER THE SAME SKY

From Starvation in North Korea to Salvation in America

By Joseph Kim with Stephan Talty

274 pp. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $28.

By 13, Kim is one of the kotjebi, “wandering swallows” or homeless street children, living off stolen pickings. After his father starves to death, he is abandoned by his mother, who sells his beloved sister in China. In a detention center, his street chops earn him a post as a guard, affording him the right to beat up new inmates and steal their possessions. Kim’s defection is almost instinctual; he walks along the train tracks and across an icy river to China, finding Christians to shelter him and arrange his passage to the United States.

We learn the thief’s tradecraft — the tactics for filching peppers and corn, and what time of day to break into houses — as well as about the pain of hunger “scraping in your stomach.” Kim reflects on the corrosive impact of famine on morality, noting that the good died first, including regime loyalists like his father who refused to take bribes or steal from employers. That knowledge weighs heavily on those who survived: “We were angry, I think, because of what had happened to us, but also because of what we’d become.”