My Education

An intimately charged novel of desire and disaster from the Booker shortlisted author of Flashlight.

Regina Gottlieb had been warned about Professor Nicholas Brodeur long before arriving as a graduate student at his prestigious university high on a pastoral hill. He’s said to lie in the dark in his office while undergraduate women read couplets to him. He’s condemned on the walls of the women’s restroom, and enjoys films by Roman Polanski. But no one has warned Regina about his exceptional physical beauty—or his charismatic, volatile wife.

My Education is the story of Regina’s mistakes, which only begin in the bedroom, and end—if they do—fifteen years in the future and thousands of miles away. By turns erotic and completely catastrophic, Regina’s misadventures demonstrate what can happen when the chasm between desire and duty is too wide to bridge.

"Sizzling...a story filled with fiery love affairs, regrettable mistakes, and between-the-sheets scenes that blow 50 Shades of Grey out of the water." --Self

"Explores a young heart and its painfully naïve and bold ways . . . It's The Graduate meets The L Word meets the Carey Mulligan flick An Education." --Marie Claire

"My Education is a raw, wild, hurtling foray into the tangled realms of sexuality and self-knowledge. Susan Choi's vast gifts as a novelist are all on display, with her restlessness, curiosity and sheer daring leading the way." --Jennifer Egan, author of Manhattan Beach

"When I finished Susan Choi's My Education, I nearly gasped. She had managed one of the most exquisite of the novelist's magic acts--produced a cogent, passionate, and surprising story, while acknowledging the ordinary, eroding aspects of lives lived daily. She had populated it with remarkable but utterly believable characters. She had written lines that could be framed, and displayed at a sentence festival. She has, in short, written an amazing book." --Michael Cunningham, author of The Hours