Recommendations
Books Like Pachinko
What to read after Pachinko by Min Jin Lee
If Pachinko's multi-generational portrait of a Korean family in Japan — the specific experience of being permanently foreign regardless of how long you've been there — left you wanting more literary fiction that uses family sagas to examine identity, history, and what gets passed down across generations, these are the books readers find next.
- 1Buy
Homegoing
by Yaa Gyasi
Two half-sisters in 18th-century Ghana begin a family history Gyasi traces through eight generations. The most structurally similar novel to Pachinko: both are multigenerational sagas that use family to examine what history does to individual lives across centuries.
- 2Buy
The Joy Luck Club
by Amy Tan
Four Chinese immigrant women and their American-born daughters in San Francisco — told through their stories of China and their children's stories of America. The canonical Asian-American multigenerational novel, and the literary ancestor of Pachinko's examination of what mothers carry and what they cannot fully transmit to children who grew up somewhere else.
- 3Buy
A Gentleman in Moscow
by Amor Towles
A Russian aristocrat sentenced to house arrest in the Metropol Hotel must build a full life within its walls across 32 years of Soviet history. Shares Pachinko's interest in a person's dignity and inner life under systems designed to deny both — different settings, same philosophical commitment.
- 4Buy
The Goldfinch
by Donna Tartt
A boy survives a museum bombing that kills his mother and carries a small Dutch painting through decades of chaos. Shares Pachinko's interest in what people carry across catastrophe and what that carrying does to them.
- 5Buy
All the Light We Cannot See
by Anthony Doerr
A blind French girl and a German orphan move toward each other through WWII. Doerr, like Lee, writes literary fiction that uses historical horror as the context in which individual human lives must find ways to survive with dignity.
- 6Buy
Shuggie Bain
by Douglas Stuart
A small, sensitive boy in 1980s Glasgow is attached to his glamorous, alcoholic mother. Booker Prize winner (2020) — shares Pachinko's commitment to a specific working-class community's interiority and to the specific way parents' failures become children's inheritance.
- 7Buy
Free Food for Millionaires
by Min Jin Lee
Lee's debut novel — a first-generation Korean-American woman graduates from Princeton and navigates New York's professional and social worlds while her family cannot understand why she doesn't come home. The earlier, shorter, more American version of what Lee examines on a multigenerational scale in Pachinko.
- 8Buy
There There
by Tommy Orange
Twelve Native Americans make their way to a powwow at the Oakland Coliseum; their lives converge toward a violent end. Orange's debut novel uses the same multiple-perspective structure as Pachinko to examine what it means to belong to a community whose home has been taken and whose identity is constantly defined by others.
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