Pachinko by Min Jin Lee
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
“There could only be a few winners, and a lot of losers. And yet we played on, because we had hope that we might be the lucky ones.”
In the early 1900s, teenaged Sunja, the adored daughter of a crippled fisherman, falls for a wealthy stranger at the seashore near her home in Korea. He promises her the world, but when she discovers she is pregnant–and that her lover is married–she refuses to be bought. Instead, she accepts an offer of marriage from a gentle, sickly minister passing through on his way to Japan. But her decision to abandon her home, and to reject her son’s powerful father, sets off a dramatic saga that will echo down through the generations.
Richly told and profoundly moving, Pachinko is a story of love, sacrifice, ambition, and loyalty. From bustling street markets to the halls of Japan’s finest universities to the pachinko parlors of the criminal underworld, Lee’s complex and passionate characters–strong, stubborn women, devoted sisters and sons, fathers shaken by moral crisis–survive and thrive against the indifferent arc of history.
“An exquisite, haunting epic... ‘moments of shimmering beauty and some glory, too,’ illuminate the narrative...Lee’s profound novel...is shaped by impeccable research, meticulous plotting, and empathic perception.”
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Min Jin Lee is a recipient of fellowships in Fiction from the Guggenheim Foundation (2018) and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard (2018-2019). Her novelPachinko(2017) was a finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction, a runner-up for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, winner of the Medici Book Club Prize, and was one of the New York Times' "Ten Best Books of 2017." A New York Times bestseller, Pachinkowas also one of the "Ten Best Books" of the year for BBC and the New York Public Library, and a "best international fiction" pick for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. In total, it was on over seventy-five best books of the year lists, including NPR, PBS, and CNN, and it was a selection for Now Read This, the joint book club ofPBS NewsHourand theNew York Times. Pachinko was translated into twenty-seven languages. Lee's debut novelFree Food for Millionaires(2007) was one of the best books of the year for theTimesof London, NPR'sFresh Air, andUSA Today, and it was a national bestseller. Her writings have appeared in the New Yorker, NPR'sSelected Shorts, One Story, the New York Review of Books, the New York Times Magazine, the New York Times Book Review,theTimes Literary Supplement,theGuardian, Condé Nast Traveler, the Times of London, and the Wall Street Journal. Lee served three consecutive seasons as a Morning Forum columnist for the Chosun Ilbo of South Korea. In 2018, she was named one of Adweek's Creative 100 for being one of the "ten writers and editors who are changing the national conversation" and one of the Guardian's Frederick Douglass 200. She received an honorary doctor of humane letters degree from Monmouth College. She was a Writer-in-Residence at Amherst College from 2019-2022.
