Pachinko (National Book Award Finalist)

History is seldom kind. In Min Jin Lee’s acclaimed and magisterial novel, four generations of a poor, proud immigrant family fight to control their destinies while exiled from their homeland.
 
In the early 1900s, teenaged Sunja, the adored daughter of a 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 bend to his will. Instead she accepts an offer of marriage from a gentle minister passing through on his way to Japan. But her decision to abandon her home and reject her son’s powerful father sets off a dramatic saga that will echo down through generations.
 
Richly told and profoundly moving, Pachinko is a story of love, sacrifice, ambition, and loyalty. From bustling street markets to the halls of one of Japan’s finest universities to pachinko parlors and the criminal underworld, Lee’s complex and passionate characters—resilient, fierce women, devoted sisters, bright sons, fathers shaken by moral crises—survive and flourish against the indifferent arc of history.