Both sweepingly ambitious in scope and deeply personal, PACHINKO follows one Korean family's desperate struggles and hard-won triumphs across decades and generations-from the Japanese annexation in 1910 through the Great Depression and World War II, all the way up to the late 1980s. The chronicle begins humbly with a hardworking family: a fisherman, his wife, and their sole surviving child. Though the family endures their fair share of hardships, they mark the beginning of a long line of descendants whose adversities, passions, and joys pervade this remarkable account of Korean history. Hoonie, a saintly father born with a cleft palate and club foot, is only the beginning of a Dickensian cast of characters, exceptional men and women in exile from a homeland they never knew and caught in the indifferent arc of history: a young, unwed mother afraid of social disgrace; the tubercular minister who saves her; a powerful gangster who pulls strings to control his loved ones' lives from afar, and many more. Although years pass and the family evolves drastically from its modest beginnings, a strong sense of shared cultural history ties them together and gives their lives deep roots. As they experience great joy, dark yearning, and moments of triumph and despair, this hugely satisfying novel explores the enduring questions of faith, family, culture, and identity.

Portrait

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 novel Pachinko (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 one of the New York Times' "Ten Best Books of 2017." A New York Times bestseller, Pachinko was 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 of PBS NewsHour and the New York Times. Pachinko will be translated into twenty-seven languages. Lee's debut novel Free Food for Millionaires (2007) was one of the best books of the year for the Times of London, NPR's Fresh Air, and USA Today, and it was a national bestseller. Her writings have appeared in the New Yorker, NPR's Selected Shorts, One Story, the New York Review of Books, the New York Times Magazine, the New York Times Book Review, the Times Literary Supplement, the Guardian, Condé Nast Traveler, the Times of London, andthe Wall Street Journal. Lee served three consecutive seasons as a Morning Forum columnist of the Chosun Ilbo of South Korea. In 2018, she was named as 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 will be a Writer-in-Residence at Amherst College from 2019-2022.