Since his birth in 1984, Kim Jong Un has been swaddled in propaganda, from the plainly silly—he could supposedly drive a car at the age of three—to the factual stories of family members who perished at his command. How did a young, unhealthy, Swiss-educated basketball fanatic hold together a country that should have fallen apart years ago? Sifting through the evidence, Anna Fifield reconstructs the life of a despotic ruler who longs for a nuclear arsenal even as his country languishes in medieval hardship.