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Pachinko
- Narrated by: Allison Hiroto
- Length: 18 hrs and 16 mins
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Publisher's summary
New York Times Notable Book of 2017
A USA Today Top 10 of 2017
July pick for the PBS NewsHour-New York Times Book Club Now Read This
Finalist for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, 2018
Winner of The Medici Book Club Prize
Roxane Gay's Favorite Book of 2017, Washington Post
New York Times best seller, number one Boston Globe best seller, USA Today best seller, Wall Street Journal best seller, and a Washington Post best seller.
A New York Times Top 10 Book of the Year and National Book Award finalist, Pachinko is an "extraordinary epic" of four generations of a poor Korean immigrant family as they fight to control their destiny in 20th-century Japan (San Francisco Chronicle).
"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.
Critic reviews
"If proof were needed that one family's story can be the story of the whole world, then
Pachinko offers that proof. Min Jin Lee's novel is gripping from start to finish, crossing cultures and generations with breathtaking power.
Pachinko is a stunning achievement, full of heart, full of grace, full of truth." (Erica Wagner, author of
Ariel's Gift and
Seizure)
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Meet Casey Han: a strong-willed, Queens-bred daughter of Korean immigrants immersed in a glamorous Manhattan lifestyle she can't afford. Casey is eager to make it on her own, away from the judgements of her parents' tight-knit community, but she soon finds that her Princeton economics degree isn't enough to rid her of ever-growing credit-card debt and a toxic boyfriend. When a chance encounter with an old friend lands her a new opportunity, she's determined to carve a space for herself in a glittering world of privilege, power, and wealth—but at what cost?
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Worst narration ever
- By Mary on 05-25-20
By: Min Jin Lee
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Never Let Me Go
- By: Kazuo Ishiguro
- Narrated by: Rosalyn Landor
- Length: 9 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged
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From the Booker Prize-winning author of The Remains of the Day and When We Were Orphans comes an unforgettable edge-of-your-seat mystery that is at once heartbreakingly tender and morally courageous about what it means to be human.
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Be patient; it will pay off
- By Kc on 05-23-05
By: Kazuo Ishiguro
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2666
- By: Roberto Bolaño
- Narrated by: John Lee, Armando Durán, G. Valmont Thomas, and others
- Length: 39 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
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Composed in the last years of Roberto Bolaño's life, 2666 was greeted across Europe and Latin America as his highest achievement, surpassing even his previous work in its strangeness, beauty, and scope. Its throng of unforgettable characters includes academics and convicts, an American sportswriter, an elusive German novelist, and a teenage student and her widowed, mentally unstable father. Their lives intersect in the urban sprawl of Santa Teresa - a fictional Juárez - on the U.S.-Mexico border.
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The Best Book I Read or Listened to in 2009
- By William on 01-05-10
By: Roberto Bolaño
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The Known World
- By: Edward P. Jones
- Narrated by: Kevin Free
- Length: 14 hrs and 18 mins
- Unabridged
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Henry Townsend, a black farmer, bootmaker, and former slave, has a fondness for Paradise Lost and an unusual mentor, William Robbins, perhaps the most powerful white man in antebellum Virginia's Manchester County. Under Robbins's tutelage, Henry becomes proprietor of his own plantation, as well as of his own slaves. When he dies, his widow Caldonia succumbs to profound grief, and things begin to fall apart.
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A meandering audiobook...
- By Daniel on 09-03-04
By: Edward P. Jones
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Austerlitz
- By: W. G. Sebald
- Narrated by: Richard Matthews
- Length: 7 hrs and 10 mins
- Unabridged
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Austerlitz, the internationally acclaimed masterpiece by "one of the most gripping writers imaginable" ( The New York Review of Books), is the story of a man's search for the answer to his life's central riddle. A small child when he comes to England on a Kindertransport in the summer of 1939, one Jacques Austerlitz is told nothing of his real family by the Welsh Methodist minister and his wife who raise him.
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To each their own
- By Sebastian Romero on 04-23-20
By: W. G. Sebald
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The Savage Detectives
- A Novel
- By: Roberto Bolaño
- Narrated by: Eddie Lopez, Armando Durán
- Length: 26 hrs and 57 mins
- Unabridged
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The late Chilean writer Roberto Bolaño has been called the García Marquez of his generation. The Savage Detectives is a hilarious and sexy, meandering and melancholy, companionable and complicated road trip through Mexico City, Barcelona, Israel, Liberia, and finally the desert of northern Mexico. It is the first of Bolaño's two giant works, with 2666, to be translated into English and is already being hailed as a masterpiece.
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Bolaño Poetic Gyre
- By Darwin8u on 11-14-14
By: Roberto Bolaño
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The Corrections
- A Novel
- By: Jonathan Franzen
- Narrated by: George Guidall
- Length: 21 hrs and 53 mins
- Unabridged
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The Corrections is a grandly entertaining novel for the new century--a comic, tragic masterpiece about a family breaking down in an age of easy fixes. After almost 50 years as a wife and mother, Enid Lambert is ready to have some fun. Unfortunately, her husband, Alfred, is losing his sanity to Parkinson's disease, and their children have long since flown the family nest to the catastrophes of their own lives. Enid has set her heart on an elusive goal: bringing her family together for one last Christmas at home.
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"Grandly Entertaining"? Really?
- By Georgia Burns on 10-08-13
By: Jonathan Franzen
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The Best Girls
- Disorder collection
- By: Min Jin Lee
- Narrated by: Greta Jung
- Length: 37 mins
- Unabridged
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An excellent student from a poor, traditional family in Seoul, the narrator has absorbed the same message her whole life: Only a boy can provide the family with dignity and wealth. Not her. Not her three sisters. Receiving approval only for uncomplaining sacrifice, she has resolved to take on her family’s troubles. She is a good girl. And she knows what good girls must do.
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Brings back sadness and hurt
- By Qats reads on 08-23-19
By: Min Jin Lee
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Underground Railroad
- By: Colson Whitehead
- Narrated by: Aïssa Maïga
- Length: 10 hrs and 44 mins
- Unabridged
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Cora, seize ans, est esclave sur une plantation de coton dans la Géorgie d'avant la guerre de Sécession. Abandonnée par sa mère lorsqu'elle était enfant, elle survit tant bien que mal à la violence de sa condition. Lorsque Caesar, un esclave récemment arrivé de Virginie, lui propose de s'enfuir, elle accepte et tente, au péril de sa vie, de gagner avec lui les États libres du Nord. De la Caroline du Sud à l'Indiana en passant par le Tennessee, Cora va vivre une incroyable odyssée.
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Wrong language
- By David Osler on 07-25-22
By: Colson Whitehead
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Americanah
- A Novel
- By: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
- Narrated by: Adjoa Andoh
- Length: 18 hrs and 44 mins
- Unabridged
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Ifemelu and Obinze are young and in love when they depart military-ruled Nigeria for the West. Beautiful, self-assured Ifemelu heads for America, where despite her academic success, she is forced to grapple with what it means to be Black for the first time. Quiet, thoughtful Obinze had hoped to join her, but with post-9/11 America closed to him, he instead plunges into a dangerous, undocumented life in London.
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Dues race matter?
- By Shen Valley CJ on 08-13-24
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The Goldfinch
- By: Donna Tartt
- Narrated by: David Pittu
- Length: 32 hrs and 24 mins
- Unabridged
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The Goldfinch is a haunted odyssey through present-day America and a drama of enthralling force and acuity. It begins with a boy. Theo Decker, a 13-year-old New Yorker, miraculously survives an accident that kills his mother. Abandoned by his father, Theo is taken in by the family of a wealthy friend. Bewildered by his strange new home on Park Avenue, disturbed by schoolmates who don't know how to talk to him, and tormented above all by his unbearable longing for his mother, he clings to one thing that reminds him of her: a small, mysteriously captivating painting that ultimately draws Theo into the underworld of art.
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Boy, am I in the minority on this one.
- By Bonny on 11-04-13
By: Donna Tartt
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Lincoln in the Bardo
- A Novel
- By: George Saunders
- Narrated by: Nick Offerman, David Sedaris, George Saunders, and others
- Length: 7 hrs and 25 mins
- Unabridged
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February 1862. The Civil War is less than one year old. The fighting has begun in earnest, and the nation has begun to realize it is in for a long, bloody struggle. Meanwhile, President Lincoln’s beloved eleven-year-old son, Willie, lies upstairs in the White House, gravely ill. In a matter of days, despite predictions of a recovery, Willie dies and is laid to rest in a Georgetown cemetery. “My poor boy, he was too good for this earth,” the president says at the time. “God has called him home.”
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"Where might God stand?"
- By Mel on 02-17-17
By: George Saunders
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The Mermaid from Jeju
- By: Sumi Hahn
- Narrated by: Cindy Kay, Raymond J. Lee
- Length: 8 hrs and 53 mins
- Unabridged
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In the aftermath of World War II, Goh Junja is a girl just coming into her own. She is the latest successful deep-sea diver in her family. She urges her mother to allow her to make their annual trip to Mt. Halla, where they trade sea delicacies for pork. A sea-village girl, Junja has never been to the mountains, where it smells like mushrooms and earth, and it is there she falls in love with mountain-boy Yang Suwol. But when Junja returns one day later, it is just in time to see her mother take her last breath, beaten by the waves during a dive she was taking in Junja's place.
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Male reader ruins the book
- By Shana Theobald on 06-01-23
By: Sumi Hahn
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The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
- By: Junot Diaz
- Narrated by: Jonathan Davis, Staci Snell
- Length: 16 hrs
- Unabridged
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Oscar is a sweet but disastrously overweight ghetto nerd who—from the New Jersey home he shares with his old world mother and rebellious sister—dreams of becoming the Dominican J.R.R. Tolkien and, most of all, finding love. But Oscar may never get what he wants. Blame the fukú—a curse that has haunted Oscar’s family for generations, following them on their epic journey from Santo Domingo to the USA.
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Wondrous Book!!!
- By Robert on 06-22-12
By: Junot Diaz
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Atonement
- By: Ian McEwan
- Narrated by: Jill Tanner
- Length: 14 hrs and 14 mins
- Unabridged
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In Atonement, three children lose their innocence, as the sweltering summer heat bears down on the hottest day in 1935, and their lives are changed forever. Cecilia Tallis is of England's priviledged class; Robbie Turner is the housekeeper's son. In their moment of intimate surrender, they are interrupted by Cecilia's hyperimaginative and scheming 13-year-old sister, Briony. And as chaos consumes the family, Briony commits a crime, the guilt of which she shall carry throughout her life.
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An amazing book about complex human perception
- By Amazon Customer on 08-17-04
By: Ian McEwan
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Behind the Beautiful Forevers
- Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity
- By: Katherine Boo
- Narrated by: Sunil Malhotra
- Length: 8 hrs and 16 mins
- Unabridged
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In this breathtaking book by Pulitzer Prize winner Katherine Boo, a bewildering age of global change and inequality is made human through the dramatic story of families striving toward a better life in Annawadi, a makeshift settlement in the shadow of luxury hotels near the Mumbai airport. As India starts to prosper, the residents of Annawadi are electric with hope. Abdul, an enterprising teenager, sees “a fortune beyond counting” in the recyclable garbage that richer people throw away.
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An Antidote for Shantaram
- By Dr. on 06-14-12
By: Katherine Boo
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Cloud Atlas
- A Novel
- By: David Mitchell
- Narrated by: Scott Brick, Cassandra Campbell, Kim Mai Guest, and others
- Length: 19 hrs and 48 mins
- Unabridged
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Cloud Atlas begins in 1850 with Adam Ewing, an American notary voyaging from the Chatham Isles to his home in California. Along the way, Ewing is befriended by a physician, Dr. Goose, who begins to treat him for a rare species of brain parasite.... Abruptly, the action jumps to Belgium in 1931, where Robert Frobisher, a disinherited bisexual composer, contrives his way into the household of an infirm maestro who has a beguiling wife and a nubile daughter....
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thoroughly enjoyed
- By Elizabeth on 01-05-08
By: David Mitchell
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Station Eleven (Television Tie-in)
- A Novel
- By: Emily St. John Mandel
- Narrated by: Kirsten Potter
- Length: 10 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged
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Kirsten Raymonde will never forget the night Arthur Leander, the famous Hollywood actor, had a heart attack on stage during a production of King Lear. That was the night when a devastating flu pandemic arrived in the city, and within weeks, civilization as we know it came to an end.
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gah!
- By Stacy on 10-08-14
What listeners say about Pachinko
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Kenneth E. Saari
- 12-05-17
Outstanding.
Outstanding. One of my favorite works of fiction I’ve been through in a long time.
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13 people found this helpful
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- jpark
- 08-28-19
Not even trying with the Korean words
The pronunciation of the Korean words are pretty bad. Was there not a single Korean person on the production to correct it?
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12 people found this helpful
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- Debra Elisa
- 06-17-19
powerful & painful & beautiful
This novel amazed me with its narrative, characters, and truth. Audio worked, too. I learned about Japan and sad similarities we find all over the world, different details.
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9 people found this helpful
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- Paula
- 07-28-18
Horrible reader
Not a bad inter generational saga. Interesting depiction of a historical era. however. the audible version ruins a good book. This reader constantly emphasizes the wrong words and totally misses the intent of the author. Agonizing to listen to.
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8 people found this helpful
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- camb94
- 04-26-18
Could've been great but failed
Would you try another book from Min Jin Lee and/or Allison Hiroto?
No
Any additional comments?
This book had the makings of a GREAT book: History, multigenerational saga, migration, all issues that are very relevant to today. Yet the interesting storylines, (Solomon, Sunja, etc) got drowned because of too many characters with unnecessary plotlines that didn't go anywhere (there's a character that shows up in one chapter, we see her discover a major secret, yet nothing comes of it. That little tidbit doesn't carry neither hers, her husband's or the main character's plots. Why put it in at all, then? Further, many characters, including a main one, are killed off suddenly and without an explanation, as if the writer no longer had use for them. If you are going to do this, give the reader an explanation: the character's thought process, the events that lead to it. Instead there are great jumps in time, other characters die and we find out years after.... Finally, the sex scenes vocabulary read like the author couldn't decide to write historical fiction or erotica. I am no prude, I have no problem with the scenes being where they are, it's the wording. Using f***k, t**s, etc, cheapens the narration. It would've been one thing if the character was in a "talk to me dirty" mood, but no. It's every single sex scene with crude words. There are better ways to write that. Throughout the audio I wondered why I book that was nominated to the National Book Award didn't get it. I now realize it was probably the issues above. It could've been great. It wasn't. I take away the immigrant struggle to make a life in a place that rejects them, the plight of women without men to bring food to the table in such a conservative society, the pain and damage that a culture of honor and deep shame can bring to a family and a person. The rest I can do without.
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5 people found this helpful
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- Mishka
- 02-17-19
Poor narration weakens a book with potential
Gosh, I've only heard a few books so poorly narrated, but this one truly takes the listener out of the story. I am grateful that I read along with this one, as I didn't even catch the mis-pronounced Korean phrases. For a story about generations of Koreans, the pronunciation should've been flawless. Also, as many others have said, the narrator sounded as though she were talking to children, or grandchildren. For a tale of heartbreak, death, and survival, her tone never matched.
In regard to the story, I have no major complaints, aside from the fact that the author left no footnotes or glossary of foreign words or colloquialisms that the greater population of readers would not know.
My only other issue with the writing is that certain plot lines are introduced and then dropped on a whim, and the story ends without resolution for them, as though the minor character was forgotten.
I would still recommend it, but I might suggest lowering your hopes.
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3 people found this helpful
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- Alethea
- 10-04-18
Interesting, family saga
Beautifully told story of a Korean family living in Japan. The beginning pulls you into their world and the end leaves you feeling completely fulfilled. Told through a number of the family members you fall in love with this family.
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1 person found this helpful
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- Judith Sanders
- 05-09-19
Could not get into the book
Although this book was some what interesting, I just could not get into it. I never finished it...maybe one day.
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1 person found this helpful
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- Amazon Customer
- 08-04-18
timely family story
I appreciated this education into 20th century Korean history and family culture .. well done.
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1 person found this helpful
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Pretty Good
Any additional comments?
I enjoyed listening to it since I was stationed in Korea and Japan years ago.[[ASIN:1537138529 Flying With The Enemy: Memoir of a Young Cadet]]
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1 person found this helpful