The Foreign Student
From the Booker Prize Shortlisted author of Flashlight
Published on 11. June 2026
320 pages
978-1-5299-6061-7 (ISBN)
Description
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 a dark episode in her past.
Without quite knowing why, these two outsiders are drawn together, each sensing in the other the possibility of salvation...
Without quite knowing why, these two outsiders are drawn together, each sensing in the other the possibility of salvation...
Reviews / Votes
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 * Two very unlikely worlds intersect in The Foreign Student, war-ravaged Korea and the genteel culture of Sewanee, Tennessee. In gracious prose, Susan Choi renders their cruelties, their lies, and their beauty -- Arthur Golden, author of Memoirs of A Geisha Susan Choi writes gracefully, insightfully and with striking maturity * Time * A young war-shocked Korean man falls for a comely southern belle with secrets of her own in Susan Choi's elegantly wrought first novel, The Foreign Student * Vanity Fair * An auspicious debut novel . . . epic in its harrowing accounts of war and intimate in its charged descriptions of the unlikely love affair at its center * The New Yorker *More details
Edition
New edition
Language
English
Place of publication
London
United Kingdom
Publishing group
Vintage Publishing
Edition type
New edition
File size
0,76 MB
ISBN-13
978-1-5299-6061-7 (9781529960617)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions
Person
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 for Fiction. In 2010 she was named the inaugural recipient of the PEN/W.G. Sebald Award. Her fourth novel, My Education, received a 2014 Lambda Literary Award. Her fifth novel, Trust Exercise, won the 2019 National Book Award for Fiction - and was a US bestseller. Flashlight began as a short story and won the Sunday Times Audible Short Story Award in 2021. Choi lives in Brooklyn, New York and teaches in the writing seminars at Johns Hopkins University.
