Pachinko – Min Jin Lee – 2017
By: Min Jin Lee
Narrated by: Allison Hiroto
Length: 18 hrs and 16 mins
Unabridged Audiobook
Release date: 02-07-17
Categories: Literature & Fiction
Language: English
Publisher: Hachette Audio
Format: mp3 64/48 stereo
Publisher’s Summary
New York Times Notable Book of 2017
A USA Today Top 10 of 2017
July pick for the PBS NewsHour-New York Times Book Club Now Read This
Finalist for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, 2018
Winner of The Medici Book Club Prize
Roxane Gay’s Favorite Book of 2017, Washington Post
New York Times best seller, number one Boston Globe best seller, USA Today best seller, Wall Street Journal best seller, and a Washington Post best seller.
A New York Times Top 10 Book of the Year and National Book Award finalist, Pachinko is an “extraordinary epic” of four generations of a poor Korean immigrant family as they fight to control their destiny in 20th-century Japan (San Francisco Chronicle).
“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.
©2017 Min Jin Lee (P)2017 Hachette Audio
Critic Reviews
“If proof were needed that one family’s story can be the story of the whole world, then Pachinko offers that proof. Min Jin Lee’s novel is gripping from start to finish, crossing cultures and generations with breathtaking power. Pachinko is a stunning achievement, full of heart, full of grace, full of truth.” (Erica Wagner, author of Ariel’s Gift and Seizure)
“Both for those who love Korea, as well as for those who know no more than Hyundai, Samsung, and kimchi, this extraordinary book will prove a revelation of joy and heartbreak. I could not stop turning the pages, and wished this most poignant of sagas would never end. Min Jin Lee displays a tenderness and wisdom ideally matched to an unforgettable tale that she relates just perfectly.” (Simon Winchester, New York Times best-selling author of The Professor and the Madman and Korea: A Walk through the Land of Miracles)
“A deep, broad, addictive history of a Korean family in Japan enduring and prospering through the 20th century.” ( The Guardian)