New Release Book Group "American Hagwon"
About this Event
Wellesley Books is pleased to announce our latest book group: The New Release Book Group (formerly know as the Signed First Edition Book Group).
Our December 2026 meeting will take place on the 7th to discuss American Hagwon by Min Jin Lee. (See below for more about this exciting new book.)
How It Works
- Sign up for this month’s discussion by buying a ticket through this page and you'll receive a copy of the book (pick-up in store at Wellesley Books). You can also buy in-store or by phone (781-431-1160).
- We will meet at the store on the given date to discuss the current selection.
- After the meeting, we'll announce our selection for the next month.
- Feel free to join in as often as you are able.
- Please note that we cannot issue refunds unless you wish to return the book. In this case, the process follows our normal book return policy, which can be found on our website.
ABOUT THE BOOK
The National Book Award finalist and New York Times bestselling author of Pachinko returns with a breathtaking contemporary epic: a masterpiece by turns sweeping and intimate, that reckons with ambition and moderation, lust and loyalty, personal dreams and familial duty.
"Min Jin Lee brings grand ambition, fierce heart, and the tenderest hope to a novel I didn't want to end." —Roxane Gay, bestselling author of Bad Feminist and Hunger
In schools and churches, hotel rooms and nail salons, law firms and fried-fish shops; in cramped, dingy apartments and luxury, gated communities, the men, women, and children in American Hagwon struggle to find satisfaction and meaning in a world that seems to grow less forgiving with each passing year. Once comfortably middle class in Korea, John and Helen Koh and their three children—Bo, DH, and Mido—find their lives upended, first by a shocking betrayal by John’s oldest friend, then by the 1997 Asian financial crisis.
Desperately striving to regain their footing, they leave Seoul for Sydney and eventually settle in Southern California—where new vistas of opportunity open up for the children as their parents, strangers in a strange land, must adjust to a new life in which their experience and education mean little, and they set their sights on whatever it takes to provide for their children’s futures. The Kohs, their friends, relatives, and even their foes move in and out of each other’s lives as they navigate new courses across the years, always nursing the almost all-consuming faith that education will lead the next generation to success and security.
In American Hagwon, Min Jin Lee has crafted an unforgettable, panoramic novel where the smallest of gestures can have enormous repercussions, where the bonds of family and of memory twist and fray but rarely break, and where willful self-sacrifice—for the benefit of loved ones and even strangers—is a kind of prayer.
"An immersive, engrossing novel ... this is panorama told in brilliant detail." —Colm Tóibín, bestselling author of Long Island and Brooklyn.
Where is it happening?
USD 0.00 to USD 41.16
