The Foreign Student

Moving between America and South Korea, the debut novel from the author of Flashlight tells a powerful story of war and unexpected love.

‘A major world writer’ New York Times

In 1955, a new student arrives at a small college in the Tennessee mountains. Chuck is shy, speaks English haltingly, and on the subject of his earlier life in Korea he will not speak at all. Then he meets Katherine, a beautiful and solitary young woman who, like Chuck, is haunted by a dark episode from the past.

Without quite knowing why, these two outsiders are drawn together, each sensing in the other the possibility of salvation.

‘Epic and intimate’ The New Yorker

‘A first novel of extraordinary sensibility and transforming strangeness’ Los Angeles Times

‘Elegantly wrought’ Vanity Fair