Books to Read If You Love “Pachinko”

In Ghana during the mid-1800’s, two half-sisters are born in neighboring villages, each unaware the other exists. One sister will marry an Englishman and live a life of comfort, while the other will be imprisoned and sold into slavery. This spectacular book follows the descendants of these two women across the years and across oceans, highlighting the ways our ancestors stories are imprinted on our own.

Shawna Yang Ryan’s moving novel follows multiple generations from Taiwan into America as each character must make the difficult decision between what is right and what might save your family. In a stunningly lyrical story of a family and a nation grappling with the nuances of complicity and survival, Green Island raises the question: how far would you go for the ones you love?

Hana and her sister Emi have lived their entire lives under Japanese occupation. Hana is a haenyeo, a female diver of the sea, which offers her more independence that few other Koreans can claim. But when Emi is harassed by a Japense soldier, Hana saves her sister but pays the price when she is captured and sent to Manchuria, forced to become a “comfort woman” in a military brothel. Over sixty years later, Emi is still struggling to forget the past. But as her children and her country move on, can she heal her wounds and begin to forgive?

Winnie and Helen have kept each other’s worst secrets for more than fifty years. Now, because she believes she is dying, Helen wants to expose everything. And Winnie angrily determines that she must be the one to tell her daughter, Pearl, about the past—including the terrible truth even Helen doesn’t know. So begins the story of Winnie’s journey from a small island outside Shanghai to the events that led her to America in 1949.

In crisp, unembellished prose, Choi Eunyoung paints intimate portraits of the lives of young women in South Korea, balancing the personal with the political. In the tradition of Sally Rooney, Banana Yoshimoto, and Marilynne Robinson—writers from different cultures who all take an unvarished look at human relationships and the femal experience—Choi Eunyoung is a writer to watch.

Luz “Little Light” Lopez, a tea leaf reader and laundress, is left to fend for herself after her older brother, Diego, a snake charmer and factory worker, is run out of town by a violent white mob. As Luz navigates 1930s Denver, she begins to have visions that transport her to her Indigenous homeland in the nearby Lost Territory. Luz recollects her ancestors’ origins, how her family flourished, and how they were threatened. She bears witness to the sinister forces that have devastated her people and their homelands for generations. In the end, it is up to Luz to save her family stories from disappearing into oblivion.

A Place for Us follows an estranged Indian family as they gather for the eldest daughter’s wedding. Each family member has had to forge their own path to figure out what it means to live between two cultures, each finding their own place in the world. Taking place over the course of the event, we will see the differences that pull them apart, and the bonds that bring them together.

A spellbinding novel tracing three generations of a Southern Black family and one daughter’s discovery that she has the power to change her family’s legacy. Unfolding over seventy years through a chorus of unforgettable voices that move back and forth in time, Memphis paints an indelible portrait of inheritance, celebrating the full complexity of what we pass down, in a family and as a country.

When the Great Depression hits, Florence Fein leaves Brooklyn College for a job in Moscow—and the promise of love and independence. But once in Russia, she quickly becomes entangled in a country she can’t escape. Many years later, Florence’s son, Julian learns that Florence’s KGB file has been opened and what he discovers is both chilling and heartbreaking. The Patriots is a riveting evocation of the Cold War years and a poignant tale of power and love, the rewards and risks of friendship, and the secrets parents and children keep from one another.

In this vivid picture of contemporary life in Korea, one family is left putting the pieces together after sixty-nine-year-old So-nyo is separated from her family, lost in the crowds of a crowded subway station in Seoul. As the family tries to find her, secrets will be revealed that will make them wonder how well they knew the woman they called Mom.

In a triumph of magic realism, Allende constructs a spirit-ridden world and fills it with colorful and all-too-human inhabitants. The Trueba family’s passions, struggles, and secrets span three generations and a century of violent social change, culminating in a crisis that brings the proud and tyrannical patriarch and his beloved granddaughter to opposite sides of the barricades. The House of the Spirits not only brings another nation’s history thrillingly to life, but also makes its people’s joys and anguishes wholly our own.

Sixteen-year-old Nao plans to escape the constant bullying of her classmates by ending her life. But before she carries out her plan, she decides to document the life of her great grandmother, a Buddhist monk who is more than a hundred-years-old. Across the Pacific, we meet Ruth, a novelist who finds a collection of artifacts in a Hello Kitty lunchbox. But looking into the lunchbox’s contents pulls Ruth into the past, into Nao’s drama and her unknown fate, and forward into her own future.

In the midst of a violent student uprising in South Korea, a young boy named Dong-ho is shockingly killed. The story of this tragic episode unfolds in a sequence of interconnected chapters as the victims and the bereaved encounter suppression, denial, and the echoing agony of the massacre. An award-winning, controversial bestseller, Human Acts is a timeless, pointillist portrait of an historic event with reverberations still being felt today, by turns tracing the harsh reality of oppression and the resounding, extraordinary poetry of humanity.

Born a generation apart and with very different ideas about love and family, Mariam and Laila are two women brought jarringly together by war, by loss, and by fate. As the war in Afghanistan inches ever closer to their home in Kabul, these two women will become a support system that will not break. It is a testament to the power of love and family and how that can move people to shocking acts of heroism in order to protect those they love.

The masterpiece of John Steinbeck’s later years, East of Eden is a sprawling epic in which Steinbeck created his most mesmerizing characters and explored his most enduring themes: the mystery of identity, the inexplicability of love, and the murderous consequences of love’s absence.