Min Jin Lee Audiobooks

Four generations of the Korean diaspora in Japan, the great subject of Pachinko

1 audiobook reviewed

★ 4.5/5 average

78 listener ratings

Who is Min Jin Lee?

Min Jin Lee, born in 1968, is a Korean American author based in Harlem, New York, whose fiction keeps returning to the Korean diaspora – its journeys, its striving and its long memory. She made her name with Free Food for Millionaires in 2007 and confirmed it with Pachinko in 2017, a finalist for the National Book Award and runner-up for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize.

In 2019 she became writer-in-residence at Amherst College in Massachusetts. The novels belong to a planned Korean quartet, whose third instalment, American Hagwon, is due in September 2026 – a reminder that this is a project still very much unfolding.

Min Jin Lee in audiobooks

Pachinko, the Lee title in our catalogue, arrives with serious credentials – National Book Award finalist, Dayton Literary Peace Prize runner-up – and carries her great subject, the Korean diaspora, into fiction of real emotional staying power. Stories of migration and belonging tend to deepen in audio, where voice does so much of the work of memory and place, and for UK listeners Pachinko is a generous way to travel well beyond the familiar borders of the anglophone novel.

Anyone who finishes it wanting more can take heart: Lee’s quartet is still growing, with American Hagwon on the horizon.