Six days. For me that is running.

One book a month is the rule and I broke it badly here. Six days — most of them late, one a Sunday where I did nothing else whatsoever and let the washing sit.

Sunja is the reason. She's introduced as a girl weighing fish at her mother's boarding house and by the time she's an old woman you've been beside her through four decades of decisions, almost none of which were free. That's the achievement of this novel. It's not a story about a person choosing her life. It's a story about a person arranging herself around what has already been chosen, over and over, with enormous stubbornness, and never once being pitiable.

I knew nothing about Koreans in Japan before this. Nothing at all! The registration, the fingerprints, the renewable permission to keep existing in the country where you were born, the surname you use at school which isn't your surname. Min Jin Lee explains none of it in a lecture. It arrives through paperwork, through a landlord, through what a teacher says to a boy. That's how it works in a life and that's how it's delivered here.

Hansu is a magnificent piece of construction. He should be a villain and he isn't, quite, and every time he reappears you feel both relief and dread, which is a difficult chord to keep striking for forty years of story.

Kyunghee and Yoseb I would happily have had more of. Two people holding a household together in a country which would prefer they weren't in it, quietly, for years, without either of them ever being the reason for a chapter.

Noa. I'm not going to say anything about Noa. It happens roughly two thirds through and I put the book face down on the arm of the chair and went and stood by the window for a while.

Nine. What costs it the tenth is the last section. Solomon's part in the eighties feels compressed, as though the author knew she had one more generation to get through and less room than she wanted. The banking chapters are the only place the book feels like it's summarising itself.

Also, small thing, I liked being told properly what a pachinko parlour is. The noise, the balls, the fact that the prizes aren't cash and the cash happens next door. A detail like that does more for a reader than a paragraph of atmosphere.

My grandmother left Galicia at nineteen and came back at sixty-one and never talked about the middle. I thought about her the whole way through and that isn't a literary reason to rate a book highly, and it's most of why I did.

I've bought two more copies since. One for my mother, one for a friend who says she doesn't like historical fiction, which this isn't, exactly.