The Foreign Student

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.

“Richly detailed . . . Moving from the present to the past, from America to Korea, Choi brings hundreds of small scenes to life.” — New York Times Book Review

“Susan Choi writes gracefully, insightfully, and with striking maturity.” —Time

“A novel of extraordinary sensibility and transforming strangeness.” — Los Angeles Times Book Review

“Elegantly wrought.” — Vanity Fair

“It is in her beautifully detailed evocation of the rich, albeit scarred emotional landscapes of her characters that Choi is at her best.” —Publishers Weekly

“[An] accomplished, perceptive novel, which invites rereading and lingers in the reader's memory.” —Booklist

“Moving and intelligent.” —Kirkus Reviews