Bridging the gap between East and West, The Farthest Place on Earth is an eye-opening, firsthand account of daily life in the most secretive, reclusive country on Earth.

When it comes to North Korea, most people prefer to look in rather than out. Longtime travel guide Avraham Tashach is not like most people. A seasoned veteran with hundreds of tours in his thirty-year career as a professional guide, Tashach truly believed he had seen everything this world had to offer. But when the opportunity came to journey into the only lasting totalitarian communist regime in modern times, he expected to find fear and hostility. He expected to find camps and armed forces.

What he found was a different North Korea.

In The Farthest Place on Earth, Tashach uses a novelist’s compelling narrative and a historian’s precision to substitute the narrow, one-sided perspective of North Korea as a solely Orwellian society into a complex, multi-layered and hospitable—albeit foreign—country.

Through eight excursions between 2016 and 2018—a chaotic period in North Korea’s relationship with the Western world—The Farthest Place on Earth takes readers on a street-level exploration of North Korea’s cities, villages, and unique culture, as seen from a Western perspective. Tashach is not afraid to break myths and confront hard truths about the country and its portrayal in Western culture. From bonding with local guides over shared experiences to donating a truckload of food to rural villages in the middle of a flash flood, this book shares incredible, unheard-of stories from the most isolated and possibly misunderstood country on Earth.