The Foreign Student

Brought to you by Penguin.

Two outsiders are drawn together in a powerful, emotionally gripping story of love and war – the debut novel from Susan Choi

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.

‘A major world writer’ New York Times

‘Epic and intimate’ The New Yorker

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

‘Elegantly wrought’ Vanity Fair

© Susan Choi 2026 (P) Penguin Audio 2026