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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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big disappointment
- By Kirsten on 04-12-12
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The Story Hour
- By: Thrity Umrigar
- Narrated by: Sneha Mathan
- Length: 11 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
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An experienced psychologist, Maggie carefully maintains emotional distance from her patients. But when she meets a young Indian woman who tried to kill herself, her professional detachment disintegrates. Cut off from her family in India, Lakshmi is desperately lonely and trapped in a loveless marriage. Moved by her plight, Maggie treats Lakshmi in her home office for free, quickly realizing that the despondent woman doesn't need a shrink; she needs a friend.
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A stellar performance almost carried the book...
- By Daryl on 03-04-15
By: Thrity Umrigar
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The Marriage Bureau for Rich People
- By: Farahad Zama
- Narrated by: Tania Rodrigues
- Length: 10 hrs
- Unabridged
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Farahad Zama's debut novel transports listeners to faraway India for a story brimming with endearing characters, homespun wisdom, and blossoming love. After Mr. Ali retires, he launches a matchmaking service that helps an array of clients arrange marriages. But he's unaware of his able assistant's dire need for his marriage bureau.
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The Marriage Bureau for Rich People
- By Lorriee on 01-29-11
By: Farahad Zama
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Before We Visit the Goddess
- By: Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
- Narrated by: Sneha Mathan, Priya Ayyar, Vikas Adam
- Length: 7 hrs and 54 mins
- Unabridged
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The daughter of a poor baker in rural Bengal, India, Sabitri yearns to get an education, but her family's situation means college is an impossible dream. Then an influential woman from Kolkata takes Sabitri under her wing, but her generosity soon proves dangerous after the girl makes a single unforgivable misstep. Years later, Sabitri's own daughter, Bela, haunted by her mother's choices, flees abroad with her political refugee lover - but the America she finds is vastly different from the country she'd imagined.
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Absolutely Worth a Credit
- By Texastanya on 08-27-16
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Secret Daughter
- By: Shilpi Somaya Gowda
- Narrated by: Soneela Nankani
- Length: 11 hrs and 25 mins
- Unabridged
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Debut novelist Shilpi Somaya Gowda pens this compelling tale about two families, worlds apart, linked by one Indian child. After giving birth to a girl for a second time, impoverished Kavita must give her up to an orphanage. The baby, named Asha, is adopted by an American doctor and raised in California. But once grown, Asha decides to return to India.
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A Must Read
- By Stephanie on 06-08-11
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Charms for the Easy Life
- By: Kaye Gibbons
- Narrated by: Kate Fleming
- Length: 6 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
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A family without men, the Birches live gloriously offbeat lives in the lush, green backwoods of North Carolina. Radiant, headstrong Sophia and her shy, brilliant daughter, Margaret, possess powerful charms to ward off loneliness, despair, and the human misery that often beats a path to their door. And they are protected by the eccentric wisdom and muscular love of the remarkable matriarch Charlie Kate, a solid, uncompromising, self-taught healer who treats everything from boils to broken bones to broken hearts.
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So Lovely!
- By Doodle slave on 01-04-17
By: Kaye Gibbons
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The Jew Store
- A Family Memoir
- By: Stella Suberman
- Narrated by: Donna Postel
- Length: 10 hrs and 52 mins
- Unabridged
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In 1920, in small-town America, the ubiquitous dry goods store was usually owned by Jews and often referred to as "the Jew store". That's how Stella Suberman's father's store, Bronson's Low-Priced Store, in Concordia, Tennessee, was known locally. The Bronsons were the first Jews to ever live in that tiny town of one main street, one bank, one drugstore, one picture show, one feed and seed, one hardware, one barber shop, one beauty parlor, one blacksmith, and many Christian churches.
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Wonderful
- By Susan simpson on 09-04-21
By: Stella Suberman
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Modern Girls
- By: Jennifer S. Brown
- Narrated by: Elizabeth Wiley
- Length: 13 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
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In 1935, Dottie Krasinsky is the epitome of the modern girl. A bookkeeper in midtown Manhattan, Dottie steals kisses from her steady beau, meets her girlfriends for drinks, and eyes the latest fashions. Yet at heart, she is a dutiful daughter, living with her Yiddish-speaking parents on the Lower East Side. So when, after a single careless night, she finds herself in a family way by a charismatic but unsuitable man, she is desperate: unwed, unsure, and running out of options.
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Super annoying voiceover
- By Amazon Customer on 04-25-17
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Vegas Rich
- Vegas, Book 1
- By: Fern Michaels
- Narrated by: Laural Merlington
- Length: 21 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
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With a heart full of dreams, Sallie Coleman leaves Texas and heads west determined to get as far from the squalor of her dirt poor beginnings. With its shifting sands, smoky saloons, and bingo palaces, Las Vegas seems like a paradise. A paradise where an extraordinary twist of fate makes Sallie the most powerful businesswoman in Nevada.
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Get this booK!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
- By Amazon Customer on 09-26-10
By: Fern Michaels
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A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
- By: Betty Smith
- Narrated by: Kate Burton
- Length: 14 hrs and 55 mins
- Unabridged
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A moving coming-of-age story set in the 1900s, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn follows the lives of 11-year-old Francie Nolan, her younger brother Neely, and their parents, Irish immigrants who have settled in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn. Johnny Nolan is as loving and fanciful as they come, but he is also often drunk and out of work, unable to find his place in the land of opportunity.
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Book: flawless. SKIP THE RECORDED INTRO!!
- By Wild Wise Woman on 09-04-11
By: Betty Smith
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Shadow of a Century
- By: Jean Grainger
- Narrated by: Alana Kerr Collins
- Length: 11 hrs and 44 mins
- Unabridged
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Mary Doyle arrives in Dublin in 1913, doomed, she fears, to a life of domestic service. Instead, however, she finds herself deeply affected by the social and political turmoil of a fledgling nation struggling for independence. Suddenly, all that was once inevitable is no longer a certainty as she is embroiled in the very heart of the Easter Rising.
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Loved this book!
- By Amazon Customer on 11-14-20
By: Jean Grainger
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The Heart's Invisible Furies
- A Novel
- By: John Boyne
- Narrated by: Stephen Hogan
- Length: 21 hrs and 10 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Cyril Avery is not a real Avery - or at least that's what his adoptive parents tell him. And he never will be. But if he isn't a real Avery, then who is he? Born out of wedlock to a teenage girl cast out from her rural Irish community and adopted by a well-to-do if eccentric Dublin couple via the intervention of a hunchbacked Redemptorist nun, Cyril is adrift in the world, anchored only tenuously by his heartfelt friendship with the infinitely more glamourous and dangerous Julian Woodbead.
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Outstanding. A Must listen.
- By Keith G on 09-04-17
By: John Boyne
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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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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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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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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
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What listeners say about Pachinko
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- Laura
- 03-23-17
Historically interesting, but...
Narrator had sweet voice but not suited to story. Into the book, some profanity and descriptions of sexual encounters were either not credible or seemed that way because of the narration.
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57 people found this helpful
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- Amazon Customer
- 06-19-18
Meh
It was promising when it began, but as the story went along, it became increasingly messy and patchy, with new characters coming and going without any obvious purpose, old characters reappearing without any apparent evolution, and far too many disjointed details to keep my attention. Some cultural and historical nuance was kind of interesting, but much of it grew repetitive. The voice also changed weirdly through the narrative; for example, the sound "neh" (or meh?) appeared a LOT in dialogue toward the latter part of the book, whereas it never came up in the beginning. I hung on, hoping for some big pay off in the end, but the story just faded away, leaving no lasting impression. Sorry, dear author. I know how hard you worked, but it just did not come together for me.
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3 people found this helpful
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- Audrey Chin
- 02-06-18
A Korean TV drama.. but aet in Jaoan
Addictive in the same way KTV is. But Draggy and uneven. Some well described characters but most are "typical"and"flat" and the rendering is poor. We keep getting descriptions of what they look like.
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2 people found this helpful
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- Amazon Customer
- 05-21-18
Korean experience as immigrants
This is a multi-generational story about Koreans as immigrants to Japan and the hardships (and successes) they face. The story breaks about 3/4 through as it switches to other family members; I found this a little disorienting as the main protagonist is dropped from the story (it seems). I also thought there was sex which was not particularly pertinent to the story line, and that was distracting. Nonetheless, the portrayal of the Korean immigrant experience in Japan was enlightening.
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1 person found this helpful
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- BB
- 09-04-18
Interesting story, wish characters had more development
This ambitious story certainly encompasses a fascinating period in history and was very thought provoking. I felt, in its execution, that it sacrificed depth (in terms of character development) for breadth and that was not necessary...I have read other books with similar time frames and complexity of characters that somehow succeeded in communicating more new ones around characters thoughts feelings and reactions to situations. There were certainly a lot of situations in this book to which I would have liked to explore more how each character felt or how those situations impacted them. I feel like this was a close to final draft that would be perfect if the author could go back and just add another layer of that depth.
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- Marie Seashell
- 04-15-19
A struggle to wade through.
Narrated well, but I didn't find the story that engaging. Too drawn out and slow moving
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- Cathy Rooney
- 02-09-18
Interesting setting, predictable plot
What did you like best about Pachinko? What did you like least?
I loved the vivid details on the impact of Korean and Japanese history on families over generations. So timely, given what is going on today.
How would you have changed the story to make it more enjoyable?
Story line a little too soapy for me ... most of characters defined by one or two traits that stay put and make the outcomes predictable.
Which character – as performed by Allison Hiroto – was your favorite?
Noah of course
If this book were a movie would you go see it?
Maybe - depends who’s in it!
Any additional comments?
I thought the narration was excellent.
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- Amazon Customer
- 07-11-18
Way too long
While there is a lot of actions, characters are flat and don't always stay consistent. There are also way too many characters and plot. But, the story is easy to follow, and the topic is fascinating. I never knew anything about the Koreans who migrated to Japan.
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- mlfarr
- 12-07-17
Enjoyed ..... but
I loved this book because it dealt with so many thought provoking issues. I loved the time and place of the story and learning more about their culture. However, while there were many uplifting things, there were also some sexual descriptions that were not needed to make it a good book! I would have recommended it to many people if it weren't for those descriptions!
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- L. Rodriguez
- 12-23-23
Wonderful 😊
This is the fastest I've ever listened to an audiobook. I haven't seen the show and didn't know much about the story. I am a fan of K dramas and thought this would be good to listen to between shows.. it didn't disappoint. It's moving and descriptive, I feel I learned a lot while also being entertained. Sometimes I wished the author gave us more details as there was plenty to say as the lives of the family members progressed. The author was clear and did a great job.
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