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.
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Character
Earnest, grave, classical in form and epic.
- earnestironic
- gravecomic
- classical in formformally daring
- intimateepic
- unpretentiousprestige
Who loves it, who doesn't
12 profiled raters. Loved most by The Empaths; disliked most by The Ironists.
Where do you stand?
Answer first; then see how everyone, and your circle, split.
“Is it too big for its own story?”
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“Is Pachinko prestige bait?”
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“Is Pachinko too earnest?”
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Ask the title
A yes-or-no question, answered from what people wrote here, on TMDB and on Wikipedia. Never made up.
Reviews
- yuki.readsThe Empath★★★★★
Four generations and not one wasted chapter. The book is generous the way a grandmother is generous: without asking if you deserve it.
About the book
- Author
- Min Jin Lee
- First published
- 2017
- Pages
- 512
- Publisher
- Grand Central Publishing, J.M. Meulenhoff, Head of Zeus
- Editions
- 17
- Language
- Korean, English
- ISBN
- 9781478967439
Where to read
Libraries first: a card gets you most books for nothing. Each opens that service’s page for this title.
On Open Library, 48 have read it and 408 want to.
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Closest on the same fourteen dimensions, from everything scored on Curator Co. Other media included when they land close.
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