Published in 2009 (first published 1998)
340 pages
Susan Choi’s first novel, The Foreign Student, won the Asian-American Literary Award for fiction. Her second novel, American Woman, was a finalist for the 2004 Pulitzer Prize. Her third novel, A Person of Interest, was a finalist for the 2009 PEN/Faulkner Award. In 2010 she was named the inaugural recipient of the PEN/W. G. Sebald Award. Her fourth novel, My Education, received a 2014 Lammy Award. Her fifth novel is Trust Exercise (April 2019) and her first book for children is Camp Tiger (May 2019). A recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation, she teaches fiction writing at Yale and lives in Brooklyn.
What is this book about?
This “auspicious debut” is “epic in its harrowing accounts of war and intimate in its charged descriptions of the unlikely love affair at its center” (New Yorker).
A young Korean man scarred by war finds unlikely love in the American South in National Book Award–winning author Susan Choi’s acclaimed debut novel.
Tennessee, 1955. When Chuck Ahn arrives in Sewanee to begin his studies at the University of the South, he is shy and speaks English haltingly. On the subject of his earlier life in Korea, he will not speak at all. Then he meets Katherine Monroe, a beautiful and solitary young woman who, like Chuck, is haunted by some dark episode in her past.
Without quite knowing why, these two outsiders are drawn together, each sensing in the other the possibility of salvation. Moving between the American South and South Korea, between an adolescent girl’s sexual awakening and a young man’s nightmarish memories of war, The Foreign Student is a powerful and emotionally gripping work of fiction.
