This title is a Joan's Pick.
This is a big, sprawling epic of a book covering four generations of a family throughout the 20th Century, in Korea and Japan.
It starts with a young couple in a poor Korean fishing village who have a disabled son. His daughter, in her teenage years is seduced and abandoned, and makes some huge compromises in order to secure a future - which takes her to Japan where much of the action of the book is played out. As the years then roll by, the way in which Koreans in Japan were looked down on and legislated against is revealed through the narrative of the story, and it's absolutely fascinating (though not, I'm sure, if you were a Korean under Japanese rule). This is a story of endless hard work, for very little return. Unless of course you own a Pachinko parlour - a kind of pinball gambling game, where there's a lot to be made from the people who can least afford to play it. Joan

• Format: Paperback / softback
• Publication Date: 25/09/2017
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
• Country of Origin: United Kingdom
• Pages: 560