The recent book by Charles Hanley, Ghost Flames, interweaves the timelines of more than a dozen people from north and south, USA and allied forces, civilian and military. It shines a light on atrocities on all sides and the brutality to life and to the land. This book joins other vivid views of that time composed in English that were published instead in a novelist's form, expressing truths that are hard to capture in non-fiction accounts: Ha Jin's 2007 book, War Trash and Richard Kim's 1970 book, Lost Names.
Here is part of the War Trash description at Amazon.com
Ha Jin's masterful new novel casts a searchlight into a forgotten corner of modern history, the experience of Chinese soldiers held in U.S. POW camps during the Korean War. In 1951 Yu Yuan, a scholarly and self-effacing clerical officer in Mao's "volunteer" army, is taken prisoner south of the 38th Parallel. Because he speaks English, he soon becomes an intermediary between his compatriots and their American captors.
And Lost Names as described at Amazon.com
...a deeply moving impression of the Korea he knew as a child during the Japanese occupation. Taking its title from the grim fact that the occupiers forced the Koreans to renounce their own names and adopt Japanese names instead,
Finally, here is part of the book description for Ghost Flames at Amazon.com
This is an intimate, deeper kind of history, whose meticulous research and rich detail, drawing on recently unearthed materials and eyewitness accounts, bring the true face of the Korean War, and the vastness of its human tragedy, into a sharper focus than ever before. The "forgotten war" becomes unforgettable.
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