Roxane Gay's
Favorite Book of 2017, Washington Post
"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.