Pachinko

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. How could you get angry at the ones who wanted to be in the game? She had failed in this important way—she had not taught her children to hope, to believe in the perhaps-absurd possibility that they might win. Pachinko was a foolish game, but life was not.

What a rich and absorbing multigenerational family saga about the immigration experience of Koreans in Japan spanning decades starting from the Japanese occupation. The discrimination and rootlessness they felt living in a country that would never accept them... my heart hurt.