Min Jin Lee, the acclaimed author of the million-copy, instant New York Times bestseller, Pachinko, returns with a breathtaking contemporary epic that follows one family as they reckon with ambition and moderation, love and loyalty, personal dreams and familial duty. John and Helen Koh and their three children – Bo, DH, and Mido – are building new lives in Korea when they find their worlds upended, first by a shocking betrayal by John’s oldest friend, and then by the 1997 Asian financial crisis. Striving to regain their footing, the Koh’s set their sights on doing whatever it takes to provide for their children’s futures. They leave Seoul for Sydney and then eventually settle in California, where new opportunities open for the children as their parents, strangers in a strange land, adjust to a new existence in which their qualifications mean little. Their way forward is lit by their faith that education will lead the next generation to a success and security that has eluded their parents. The Kohs, their friends, relatives and even their foes move in and out of each other’s lives as they navigate love, work, fortune and fulfilment across the years. But with each new sacrifice and each fresh horizon, larger questions begin to open up before the What are we willing to give up to secure the happiness of the ones we love? And, what is truly important for a worthwhile life? In American Hagwon, Min Jin Lee has crafted a transcendent, panoramic novel where the smallest of gestures can have enormous repercussions and where sometimes it is our family and friendships alone that can save us.
Author
Min Jin Lee’s novel Pachinko (Feb 2017) is a national bestseller, a New York Times Editor’s Choice and an American Booksellers Association’s Indie Next Great Reads. Lee’s debut novel Free Food for Millionaires (May 2007) was a No. 1 Book Sense Pick, a New York Times Editor’s Choice, a Wall Street Journal Juggle Book Club selection, and a national bestseller; it was a Top 10 Novels of the Year for The Times of London, NPR’s Fresh Air and USA Today. Min Jin went to Yale College where she was awarded both the Henry Wright Prize for Nonfiction and the James Ashmun Veech Prize for Fiction. She attended law school at Georgetown University and worked as a lawyer for several years in New York prior to writing full time. She has received the NYFA Fellowship for Fiction, the Peden Prize from The Missouri Review for Best Story, and the Narrative Prize for New and Emerging Writer. Her fiction has been featured on NPR’s Selected Shorts and has appeared most recently in One Story. Her writings about books, travel and food have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The New York Times Book Review, The Times Literary Supplement, Conde Nast Traveler, The Times of London, Vogue (US), Travel + Leisure (SEA), Wall Street Journal and Food & Wine. Her personal essays have been anthologized in To Be Real, Breeder, The Mark Twain Anthology: Great Writers on His Life and Work, One Big Happy Family, Sugar in My Bowl, and The Global and the Intimate: Feminism in Our Time. She served three consecutive seasons as a Morning Forum columnist of the Chosun Ilbo of South Korea. Lee has spoken about writing, politics, film and literature at various institutions including Columbia University, French Institute Alliance Francaise, The Center for Fiction, Tufts, Loyola Marymount University, Stanford, Johns Hopkins (SAIS), University of Connecticut, Boston College, Hamilton College, Hunter College of New York, Harvard Law School, Yale University, Ewha University, Waseda University, the American School in Japan, World Women’s Forum, Korean Community Center (NJ), the Hay Literary Festival (UK), the Tokyo American Center of the U.S. Embassy, the Asia House (UK), and the Asia Society in New York, San Francisco and Hong Kong. In 2017, she won the Literary Death Match (Brooklyn/Episode 8), and she is a proud alumna of Women of Letters (Public Theater). From 2007 to 2011, Min Jin lived in Tokyo where she researched and wrote Pachinko. She lives in New York with her family.
