By Min Jin Lee

On Sale: Aug 4, 2026
Page Count: 736 pages
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
ISBN-13: 9781538784044

$23.99

$31.99 CAD

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A paperback special limited edition of Free Food for Millionaires, the stunning debut by the NYT bestselling author of Pachinko—following a Korean-American daughter of first-generation immigrants who strives to join Manhattan’s inner circle

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Full cover with special effects
Four color stenciled edges
Four color tip-in

National Book Award finalist Min Jin Lee introduces the unforgettable Casey Han: a strong-willed, Queens-bred daughter of Korean immigrants, who seeks both glamour and insight in Manhattan—a glittering borough she cannot afford. Fresh out of Princeton with an economics degree, no job, and a white boyfriend she cannot introduce to her parents, Casey is determined to claim a space for herself—but how and at what cost?

Lee’s bestselling, sharp-eyed, sweeping epic of ambition, dreams, and uncertainties of life—set in a landscape where millionaires scramble for free lunches the poor are too proud to accept—is an addictively readable, startlingly sympathetic portrait of intergenerational strife and immigrant struggle, revealing the fascinating lives of a vital community clinging to its old ways in a moneyed city of haves and have-nots.

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Min Jin Lee is the author of the novels Free Food for Millionaires and Pachinko, a finalist for the National Book Award, runner-up for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, and a New York Times “100 Best Books of the Century.” She serves as the New York State Author Laureate from 2025 through 2027. She is the 2024 recipient of The Fitzgerald Prize for Literary Excellence. Lee has received the Manhae Grand Prize for Literature, the Bucheon Diaspora Literary Award, and the Samsung Happiness for Tomorrow Award for Creativity from South Korea. She is the recipient of fellowships in Fiction from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Harvard Radcliffe Institute, and the New York Foundation for the Arts. Lee is an inductee of the New York Foundation for the Arts Hall of Fame and the New York State Writers Hall of Fame. She lives in Harlem with her family.

New York Times Book Review Editor's Choice

NPR Fresh Air Top Ten Books of the Year

USA Today Top Ten Books of the Year

The Times (London) Top Ten Books of the Year
“Ambitious, accomplished, engrossing…as easy to devour as a nineteenth-century romance.”
New York Times
“Sensitive to the nuances of race and class…a book you finish feeling certain the lives inside will go on long after the final page.”
People
“Unfolds in New York in the 1990s with an energetic eventfulness and a sprawling cast that call to mind the literary classics of Victorian England…It would be remarkable if she had simply written a long novel that was as easy to devour as a nineteenth-century romance—packed with tales of flouted parental expectations, fluctuating female friendships and rivalries, ephemeral (and longer-lasting) romantic hopes and losses, and high-stakes career gambles. But Lee intensifies her drama by setting it against an unfamiliar backdrop: the tightly knit social world of Korean immigrants, whose children strive to blend into their American foreground without clashing with their distinctive background. It’s a feat of coordination and contrast that could kill a chameleon, but Lee pulls if off with conviction.”
New York Times Book Review
“This big, beguiling book has all the distinguishing marks of a great American novel…[a] remarkable writer.”
The Times (London)
“Could have been penned by Austen herself.”
Daily Mail
“Lee has updated the Victorian novel of progress to a postmodern, postfeminist world and imagined a character whose circumstances feel universal.”
Chicago Tribune
“An expansive story…draws the reader with likeably human, multidimensional characters and a subtly shifting, unpredictable plot.”
Washington Post
“It is no exaggeration to say that Lee’s debut deserves to mentioned in the same breath as Eliots’s great doorstopper [Middlemarch]. What is more, it is arguably even more fun.”
South China Morning Post
"Mesmerizing...Not since Jhumpa Lahiri's The Namesake has an author so exquisitely evoked what it's like to be an immigrant."
USA Today

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Min Jin Lee

About the Author

Min Jin Lee is a recipient of fellowships in Fiction from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Radcliffe Institute of Advanced Study at Harvard, and the New York Foundation for the Arts. Lee’s debut novel, Free Food for Millionaires, was one of the “Top 10 Novels of the Year” for The Times (London), NPR’s Fresh Air, and USA Today. Her second novel, Pachinko, was a finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction, runner-up for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, winner of the Medici Book Club Prize, and a New York Times 10 Best Books of the Year. Lee’s writings have appeared in The New Yorker, NPR’s Selected Shorts, the New York Review of Books, the New York Times Book Review, The Times Literary Supplement, The Chosun Ilbo, Conde Nast Traveler, The Times (London), and The Wall Street Journal. She serves as a trustee of PEN America and a director of the Authors Guild.

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Min Jin Lee

About the Author