Free Food for Millionaires

Lee’s debut novel follows Casey Han, the daughter of working-class Korean immigrants, as she tries to make a life for herself in Manhattan after graduating from Princeton. Casey is smart, restless, and deeply conflicted about what she wants, caught between the expectations of her parents’ tight-knit community and the glittering world of finance and fashion she has glimpsed but cannot quite afford.

Why Read This

If Pachinko is Lee’s historical epic, Free Food for Millionaires is her contemporary social novel. The setting is late 1990s New York, and the cast is large: Korean-American professionals, Wall Street traders, church elders, hat designers, and the families that hold them all together or push them apart. Lee writes about money, class, and aspiration with the sharp eye of a Victorian novelist, tracking exactly what things cost and who can afford them.

The novel is also a remarkable portrait of intergenerational conflict in immigrant families. Casey’s parents sacrificed everything so she could have a Princeton degree, and they cannot understand why she keeps making choices that seem designed to throw it all away. That tension, between gratitude and resentment, between duty and desire, runs through every chapter.

What to Expect

A long, engrossing social novel with a large cast and multiple plotlines. The prose is warm and the pacing is leisurely. Lee takes her time with each character, and the pleasure of the book is in how the stories weave together. Readers who enjoy novels about how people navigate class, family, and ambition in a big city will feel right at home.