Anyone who reads the news or has logged onto social media is aware of the cult of personality around North Korea’s Kim dynasty. From afar, it’s almost cartoonish, with the bronze statues and the funny haircuts and the penchant for nuclear threats. But examined up close, it’s remarkable—almost breathtaking—in its intensity, in its durability, and, perhaps most strikingly, in its religiosity.

When I first started covering North Korea for The Wall Street Journal more than a decade ago, I was perplexed to learn that Kim Il Sung, the state founder, had been born and raised in a devout Presbyterian family, on the outskirts of a city, Pyongyang, that was so thoroughly Christianized that it was known as the “Jerusalem of the East.” I wondered whether there might have been some connection between Kim’s upbringing in the church and the religiosity of the personality cult that he constructed.

Over the course of twelve years of research and writing, the evidence was, to my mind, unmistakable. Along the way, I realized just how much Kim Il Sung and the broader fate of the North Korean people are woven into the story of modern Korea—in all of its many tragedies, from feudal decay to Japanese colonization to division and civil war. It’s a magnificent story, albeit one full of heartbreak and pain.

Here are five books that were essential to my understanding of the story.

Barbara Demick, Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea (Random House)

This work of narrative non-fiction is rightly hailed as the best work on North Korea’s devastating famine of the 1990s, which coincided with Kim Il Sung’s death in 1994. Here, Demick tells the story of Kim Il Sung’s 25 million subjects through the personal tales of just a few of them, bringing to life not only the tragedy of North Korea’s most difficult period, but also underscoring the power of the Kim family personality cult even at a moment when it seemed all was lost.

Richard E. Kim, Lost Names: Scenes from a Korean Boyhood (University of California Press)

This collection of thinly veiled autobiographical vignettes from a pioneering Korean American author offers a visceral, ground-level view of what it felt like to live under Japanese colonial rule as a Korean, and what it meant to see Korea liberated—only to then see it divided. Told with tenderness and empathy, this evocative collection of stories from a third-generation Korean Christian writer captures the feelings of nationalism and shame that animated Kim Il Sung.