In six masterly stories, Adam Johnson delves deep into love and loss, natural disasters, the influence of technology, and how the political shapes the personal. He returns to his signature subject, North Korea, in the title story, which depicts two defectors from Pyongyang who are trying to adapt to their new lives in Seoul, while one cannot forget the woman he left behind. FORTUNE SMILES gives voice to the perspectives we don’t often hear, while offering a new way of looking at the world.

Pak Jun Do is the haunted son of a lost mother --- a singer “stolen” to Pyongyang --- and an influential father who runs a work camp for orphans. Superiors in the North Korean state soon recognize the boy’s loyalty and keen instincts. Considering himself “a humble citizen of the greatest nation in the world,” Jun Do rises in the ranks. He becomes a professional kidnapper who must navigate the shifting rules, arbitrary violence and baffling demands of his overlords in order to stay alive. Driven to the absolute limit of what any human being could endure, he boldly takes on the treacherous role of rival to Kim Jong Il in an attempt to save the woman he loves, Sun Moon, a legendary actress “so pure, she didn’t know what starving people looked like.”