Pachinko

By Min Jin Lee

This is a really powerful presentation of women’s resilience and grit in the face of adversity. ‘Pachinko’ is an expansive, multigenerational epic which offers a fascinating insight into life for Koreans in Japan in the 20th century. A moving and memorable read.
~ Her Majesty Queen Camilla
More about the Author

Share the book

Publish Date: 2017

Yeongdo, Korea 1911. In a small fishing village on the banks of the East Sea, a club-footed, cleft-lipped man marries a fifteen-year-old girl. The couple have one child, their beloved daughter Sunja. When Sunja falls pregnant by a married yakuza, the family face ruin. But then Isak, a Christian minister, offers her a chance of salvation: a new life in Japan as his wife. Following a man she barely knows to a hostile country in which she has no friends, no home, and whose language she cannot speak, Sunja’s salvation is just the beginning of her story. Through eight decades and four generations, Pachinko is an epic tale of family, identity, love, death and survival.

You might also like these books…

    A Tale of Two Cities

    By Charles Dickens

    Publish Date: 1859
    Vividly interweaving epic historical drama with personal tragedy, Dickens’s gripping novel depicts the lives of two very different men, Charles Darnay, an exiled French aristocrat, and Sydney Carton, a disreputable but brilliant English lawyer, as they become enmeshed through their…
  • Love in the Time of Cholera

    By Gabriel García Márquez

    Publish Date: 1985
    Fifty-one years, nine months and four days have passed since Fermina Daza rebuffed hopeless romantic Florentino Ariza’s impassioned advances and married Dr Juvenal Urbino instead. During that half-century, Flornetino has fallen into the arms of many delighted women, but has…
  • A Suitable Boy

    By Vikram Seth

    Publish Date: 1993 Awards: 1994 Commonwealth Writers Prize
    At its core, A Suitable Boy is a love story: the tale of Lata – and her mother’s – attempts to find her a suitable husband, through love or through exacting maternal appraisal. At the same time, it is the…