Books To Read if You Love Pachinko

It is 1960, and three sisters have been found near their wrecked Jeep at the bottom of a 150-foot cliff on the north coast of the Dominican Republic. The official state newspaper reports their deaths as accidental. It does not mention that a fourth sister lives. Nor does it explain that the sisters were among the leading opponents of the dictatorship of General Rafael Leónidas Trujillo. It doesn’t have to. Everybody knows of Las Mariposas—the Butterflies. Told through the voices of all four sisters, this novel tells their story of courage, love, and the human cost of political oppression.

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?

Ah Boon is born in a fishing village amid the heat and beauty of 20th-century coastal Singapore in the waning years of British rule. He is a gentle boy who is not much interested in fishing, preferring to spend his days playing with the neighbor girl, Siok Mei. By the time they are teens, Ah Boon and Siok Mei are caught in the tragic sweep of history: the Japanese army invades, the resistance rises, grief intrudes, and the future of the fishing village is in jeopardy. As the nation hurtles toward rebirth, the two friends, newly empowered, must decide who they want to be, and what they are willing to give up.

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.

A triumph of realist fiction, George Eliot’s Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life explores a fictional 19th-century Midlands town in the midst of sweeping change. The proposed Reform Bill, the new railroads, and scientific advances are threatening upheaval on every front. Against this backdrop, the quiet drama of ordinary lives is played out by the novel’s complexly portrayed characters — until the arrival of two outsiders further disrupts the town’s equilibrium. Every bit as powerful and perceptive in our time as it was in the Victorian era, Middlemarch displays George Eliot’s clear-eyed yet humane understanding of characters caught up in the mysterious unfolding of self-knowledge.

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.

In 1951, a mysterious old woman confronts Pilar Aguirre in the small border town of La Cienega, Texas. The old woman is sure Pilar stole her husband and, in a heated outburst, lays a curse on Pilar and her family. More than 40 years later, Lulu Muñoz is dodging chaos at every turn: her troubled father’s moods, his rules, her secret life as singer in a punk band, but most of all her upcoming quinceañera. When her beloved grandmother passes away, Lulu finds herself drawn to the glamorous stranger. Their unexpected kinship picks at the secrets of Lulu’s family’s past. As the quinceañera looms — and we move between these two strong, irascible female voices — one woman must make peace with the past, and one girl pushes to embrace her future.

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.

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.

Singapore, 1939: life on the eve of World War II just isn’t what it used to be for Walter Blackett, head of British Singapore’s oldest and most powerful firm. Business may be booming — what with the war in Europe, the Allies are desperate for rubber and helpless to resist Blackett’s price-fixing and market manipulation — but something is wrong. No one suspects that the world of the British Empire, of fixed boundaries between classes and nations, is about to come to a terrible end. A love story and a war story, a tragicomic tale of a city under siege and a dying way of life, The Singapore Grip completes the “Empire Trilogy” that began with Troubles and the Booker prize-winning Siege of Krishnapur.