Pachinko book cover6/2/2023 The first character we meet is Sunja, the daughter of an arranged marriage in Yeongdo (a fishing village at the southern tip of Korea) who falls in love with a prominent (and married) mobster. The novel announces its intentions from the opening sentence “history has failed us, but no matter” and proceeds on a sprawling and nuanced depiction of four generations of an ethnic Korean family - first in Japanese-occupied Korea in the early 20th century to Japan from the years before WWII to the late 1980s. It is a vivid and humanizing novel worthy of inclusion on everyone’s reading list. This novel is revolutionary in its honest and often brutal depiction of the immigrant experience yet reads like a compassionate, beautiful hymn to the struggles of people in a foreign land. It is rare for a work of fiction to read with such intimacy and heartbreak the rich tapestry of characters and emotional conflict spanning nearly 100 years to explore the universal themes of resilience, family, identity, and displacement. Pachinko is a 2017 finalist for the National Book Award for fiction and has featured on the bestseller lists of the New York Times, Boston Globe, Washington Post, USA Today, and Wall Street Journal.
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