Fiction is just another way of telling the truth. If you’re reading this blog, you’ll probably agree with that statement. Do you, like me, like to sometimes pair up works of fiction and non-fiction on the same subject? Each form has its advantages, so you can really get a fuller image of a time or place or event or group of people.

If that appeals to you, I have suggestions. (Does that make me like a book sommelier?) These four works really do prove that reading books can take you places you wouldn’t otherwise venture – I sure as hell am never going to Afghanistan or North Korea.

(If you only ever read fiction or only ever read non-fiction don’t worry, these are all good on their own.)

The Underground Girls of Kabul: In Search of a Hidden Resistance in Afghantistan, by Jenny Nordberg (4 stars) and The Pearl that Broke Its Shell, by Nadia Hashimi (3 stars)

In Afghanistan’s male-dominated society, there’s an old tradition known as bacha posh, where young girls are raised as boys. They are dressed as boys and treated as boys and presented to the world as boys. Why would anyone do this, you ask? To put it bluntly: because Afghanistan is one of the worst countries in the world to be a woman.

In The Underground Girls of Kabul, Nordberg, an investigative journalist, stumbles upon this practice while interviewing a female member of parliament, who has turned one of her four daughters into a boy. She then travels the country trying to unravel the complexities of the bacha posh custom, and the resulting book is a fascinating account of girls and women living this double life.

Hashimi’s novel, The Pearl that Broke Its Shell, follows a young girl-turned-boy-turned married woman (make that married 13-year-old!!) in 2007, and the story of her great-great-great grandmother who lived as a man almost a century earlier. (There’s even a woman member of parliament in this one, too.)

I try not to be too judgmental of other cultures, but I wanted to crawl right into these pages and grab all these people and shake them and scream “WHAT IS THE MATTER WITH YOU?” Both books demonstrate a widespread ignorance in Afghan society. Both are sickening in their descriptions of the horrors that women endure there at the hands of men – and worse, other women. And both provide a glimpse of the utter freedom and happiness that a bacha posh experiences, if ever so briefly. Underground is better written, but that didn’t stop me from bawling at Pearl.

Without You There is No Us: My Time with the Sons of North Korea’s Elite, by Suki Kim (4 stars) and The Orphan Master’s Son, by Adam Johnson (4 stars)

Well, I’ll say this for the Democtratic People’s Republic of Korea: unlike Afghanistan, it treats its men AND women equally badly.

In Without You There is No Us, Suki Kim, a South-Korean-American journalist finds ways to enter the DPRK several times over the course of many years, culminating in a stint as an English teacher (by way of posing as a missionary) at Pyongyang University of Science and Technology just before the death of Kim Jong-Il. It’s quite an undertaking, given what a forbidding place she is in. Kim writes of her desire to engage her students and open their minds while having to follow the rules of the counterparts and minders, which are as restrictive as you can fathom in such a dictatorship. The students are likeable though tough for us to get to know, and we see the little slice of North Korea that Kim and her fellow teachers are permitted to see.

The Orphan Master’s Son won the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and while that can be a reason NOT to read a book, this one is excellent! The novel exhibits a wider scope of North Korean society, not surprisingly as Johnson’s imagination is free to roam all the places to which Kim and all western observers are denied. Like Without You it also paints a grim picture, and is both harrowing and darkly comic at turns. Though protagonist Pak Jun Do is actually a kidnapper, he’s not a bad guy. We follow as he makes his way through various echelons of society, experiences a trip to the U.S., and encounters some very high-profile individuals.