Min Jin Lee’s first novel is a wonderfully engrossing tale about a girl with Korean parents trying to make it big in Manhattan. She’s essentially American and extremely well educated, studying at Princeton, but her parents are still struggling to make ends meet. She’s surrounded by wealthy friends and has their tastes in clothes and eating out — but none of their money or contacts. The novel really draws you in to her contrasting worlds of brutality and poverty, and privilege and ignorance. It is a page-turner, starting as a coming-of-age novel and ending as upmarket soap opera, full of surprises and different perspectives. Highly recommended.’