Shin is unusual even among the other prisoners at Camp 14. He has never experienced the outside world because he was born at the camp. Camp 14 was for those who angered the repressive North Korean state, where they were forced to toil in factories, on farms and down coal mines, and in many cases worked to death. Every prisoner has to work in order to earn their allocation of food for each day. Shin's mother works exceptionally hard so that she can earn enough food for both of them but Shin is not emotionally attached to his mother at all and instead of gratitude feels only a rivalry with her as she is a competitor for the food. In general she is a cruel parent who is physically abusive and beats her son. Like all young people in the camp Shin is raised to inform on his family if they display any anti-government sentiment.
Camp 14, like North Korea as a whole, is always in the middle of a food shortage. This makes for hungry students at the camp school attended by Shin and all school age residents of the camp. As well as teaching children to read and write, the purpose of school is to brainwash them and to instill absolute and mindless devotion to the regime. When Shin turns ten he is considered old enough for work down the coalmines. It is a lonely life, he is conditioned to trust nobody and therefore enjoying family connections and making friends is almost impossible.
Things change when Shin is thirteen. One day he finds his older brother, whom he has never liked, talking with his mother, and sees that she has cooked rice for him which is always a scarcity. Shin is jealous. He hears the planning an escape from the camp, and that evening tells an acquaintance what he has learned. He also tells a night guard, expecting kudos, but finding that he himself is in trouble. He is thrown into the secret prison that exists underneath the camp and tortured for six months. He realizes that the night guard claimed to have found out about the escape attempt himself, and has also inferred that Shin is involved as well. Eventually he convinces a couple of day guards to talk to his acquaintance Hong as he can substantiate his story. Shortly afterwards, Shin is moved to a cell with a man who is nicknamed "Uncle" because he takes care of some of the young prisoners. He dresses Shin's wounds and also shows him how to tend to them himself. He is a gentle and benevolent presence in a place where benevolence is even more scarce than food.
Soon Shin is moved to a cell that he will share with his father, who was also imprisoned under suspicion of being involved in the escape attempt. They barely know each other because paternal involvement within camp is all but prohibited by the regime. When it is finally realized that neither father nor son had anything to do with planning an escape they are released, but are taken to watch the execution of Shin's mother and brother, which is also viewed by the entire population of the camp.
After finishing school, Shin begins to work manual jobs at the camp. He is a pig farmer first of all, which is a prestigious job, because the authorities believe that the work is more physically demanding than any other, and consequently pig farmers are allocated more food in order to fuel the level of work that is required from them. Without warning, though, he is moved to the garment factory and told to spy on a new prisoner named Park Yong Chui. He is looking forward to the opportunity to impress guards and the prison authorities, but to his surprise finds that he likes Park. The young men become friends and slowly develop a plan to escape from the camp together.
One night they run towards the electric fences around the perimeter of the camp. Park is electrocuted by the fence. Shin is not deterred, and steps over Park's lifeless body in order to make it over the fence. He heads for a nearby village and wanders in the direction of the border with China for the next few months. He eventually earns enough money by 2005 to afford to bribe a border guard into letting him cross the border. Once he is in China he travels the country looking for work in the restaurant trade. He meets up with a group of North Korean defectors and through them meets a journalist from South Korea who invites him to fly to Seoul to speak to human rights activists working there. Shin becomes involved with the group and publishes a memoir, but it is not particularly forthcoming about the real facts of his life because he is starting to feel an almost crushing guilt about what he has done, and particularly about being the cause of his mother's execution. He joins an American-run non-profit organization called LINK and he travels to California with them to talk about North Korean prison camps. He is still reluctant to admit the details of his life in the camps. He claims post traumatic stress disorder, and is unable to talk about his own actions. By this time, his memoir and his public speaking activities have come to the attention of the North Korean regime who release a series of propaganda videos designed specifically to discredit Shin and to deny the existence of the camps he is talking about. This causes him to admit that there are some discrepancies in his stories, in which he exaggerated his own suffering in the camp, whilst simultaneously downplaying his role in the executions of his mother, brother and other people on whom he informed.
