Blurb text
Both sweepingly ambitious in scope and deeply personal, PACHINKO follows one Korean family's desperate struggles and hard-won triumphs across decades and generations-from the Japanese annexation in 1910 through the Great Depression and World War II, all the way up to the late 1980s. The chronicle begins humbly with a hardworking family: a fisherman, his wife, and their sole surviving child. Though the family endures their fair share of hardships, they mark the beginning of a long line of descendants whose adversities, passions, and joys pervade this remarkable account of Korean history. Hoonie, a saintly father born with a cleft palate and club foot, is only the beginning of a Dickensian cast of characters, exceptional men and women in exile from a homeland they never knew and caught in the indifferent arc of history: a young, unwed mother afraid of social disgrace;.