American Woman

A young woman is drawn into a group of revolutionaries in this stunning novel from the Booker Prize-shortlisted author of Flashlight. 
 
‘I couldn’t put American Woman down’ Joan Didion 
 
‘A fascinating portrait of dangerous fragility’ New York Times 
 
On the run after an act of violence against the American government, twenty-five-year-old Jenny Shimada is drawn into caring for three younger fugitives. One of them, the kidnapped granddaughter of a San Francisco millionaire, has become a national celebrity for joining her captors’ revolutionary cell. 
 
Yet as Jenny and her charges pursue their destinies from an old farmhouse in upstate New York to California, isolation turns to paranoia and their radical ideals soon begin to fracture. 
 
The Pulitzer Prize for Fiction Finalist 
 
‘Beautiful… A work of real achievement’ Jennifer Egan 
 
‘Mesmerising’ Vanity Fair 
 
‘Riveting, deeply affecting’ Jhumpa Lahiri 
 
‘Amazing…compelling’ Los Angeles Times

Susan Choi . . . proves herself a natural – a writer whose intelligence and historical awareness effortlessly serve a breathtaking narrative ability. I couldn’t put American Woman down, and wanted when I finished it to do nothing but read it again

Prepare to be held hostage by Susan Choi’s mesmerizing American Woman

Riveting . . . Choi has the rare gift of bringing such notorious moments of history back to life and making them altogether new

With uncompromising grace and mastery, Susan Choi renders the intimate moments which bring to life a tale of prodigious sweep

Deeply impressive: confident, historically astute, psychologically persuasive . . . beautiful . . . a work of real achievement

In the manner of Don DeLillo’s Libra or Joyce Carol Oates in Black Water . . . [Choi] takes us straight into one of the strangest segments of our ever surreal American dream life

Masterfully plotted . . . American Woman is that rarest of creations, a political novel that gives equal weight to its characters’ inner and outer lives

Takes a hard-eyed look at American idealism, and yet its imaginative abundance, its fascination with self invention and its portrayal of the landscape as a living, breathing presence provide a quintessentially American sense of possibility

Historical sweep and startling particular shrewdness . . . Choi has written a fascinating portrait of dangerous fragility

Few writers since Graham Greene have brought such tender, insightful, poetic, intelligent, darkly comic writing to the political thriller

Susan Choi is the author of the novels Flashlight, Trust Exercise, My Education, A Person of Interest, American Woman and The Foreign Student. She has won the National Book Award for Fiction, the Asian American Literary Award for Fiction, the PEN/W. G. Sebald Award and a Lambda Literary Award, and has been a finalist for the Booker Prize and the Pulitzer Prize. Flashlight began as a short story and received the Sunday Times Short Story Award. Susan Choi lives in Brooklyn, New York, and teaches in the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University.

On the run after an act of violence against the American government, twenty-five-year-old Jenny Shimada is drawn into caring for three younger fugitives. One of them, the kidnapped granddaughter of a San Francisco millionaire, has become a national celebrity for joining her captors’ revolutionary cell. 
 
Yet as Jenny and her charges pursue their destinies from an old farmhouse in upstate New York to California, isolation turns to paranoia and their radical ideals soon begin to fracture.

Flashlight

**SHORTLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE 2025** 
 
A moment is all it takes to shatter a family. The echoes last a lifetime... 
 
‘Ferociously smart and full of surprises’ Eleanor Catton 
 
‘Engrossing... Full of brains and mystery’ Telegraph 
 
One evening, ten-year-old Louisa and her father, Serk, take a walk out on the breakwater. They are spending the summer in a coastal Japanese town. Hours later, Louisa wakes on the beach, soaked to the skin. Her father is missing: presumably drowned. 
 
This sudden event shatters their small family. As Louisa and her American mother return to the US, Serk's disappearance reverberates across time and space, and the mystery of what really happened that night slowly unravels. 
 
A Book of the Year for the Guardian, Time, New Yorker, Esquire, Vanity Fair, FT and Barack Obama 
 
'Big, bold and surprising’ Guardian 
 
'Illuminates the buried secrets of the human heart' Oprah Daily 
 
'Gorgeous... Almost impossibly heartbreaking' New York Magazine 
 
'It will make your head spin in the best way' Dakota Johnson 
 
'Endlessly dazzling' Vogue 
 
READERS LOVE FLASHLIGHT 
 
'Compelling, fascinating, original. Read this book' 
'Five stars. Heartbreaking' 
'A beautifully written story of a family across decades' 
'I loved it - the best read in years. Glorious' 
'Absolutely brilliant'

A rich generational saga that teems with intelligence, curiosity and, in terms of reading, sheer pleasure. Like the flashlight of its title it cast an evasive, variably illuminating beam…. It surely cannot be overlooked by this year’s Booker judges

Choi is one of contemporary literature’s great demolition artists, and her emotional foundations hold. She can build as well as she detonates… Like the best of those early-00s novels, Flashlight is all kinds of big: capacious of intent and scope and language and swagger

Engrossing... Choi is an astute, convincing writer…Flashlight [is] a rewarding read

An ambitious generational saga meets mystery thriller that spans several decades and countries… The story begins with a disappearance, then ripples out from there for a compulsive read

Choi’s startling, bristling characters power this journey, which plays in the reader’s mind with cinematic intensity

In this superbly crafted book, the fraught geopolitics of family life — the official secrets, the acts of espionage, the diplomatic failures — are set against the intimacies, grievances, conflicting memories, and unmet needs of national allegiance. Ferociously smart and full of surprises, Flashlight is thrilling to the last

Flashlight is instantly bewitching: a mysterious family tragedy whose solution reaches beyond psychology into geopolitics. Susan Choi’s fictional investigation reveals a writer at the height of her spectacular powers

Flashlight is a sensitive familial portrait, rigorous in its scope and complexity of feeling. Susan Choi is a master of rendering relationships with utter particularity

I devoured Flashlight. Once I started reading, I couldn’t put it down, and once I finished, I couldn’t stop thinking about it. The plot builds like a symphony rising to a crescendo, full of surprise and wonder. The story is as astonishing as it is entirely plausible. Susan Choi clearly knows well the fraught geopolitics of Korea and Japan, and did her homework

Barbara Demick, author of Nothing to Envy

In a brilliant feat of storytelling, both intimate and sweeping, Susan Choi has created a profoundly moving epic that blends a tender family portrait with a haunting examination of the Korean diaspora. Flashlight is that rare novel that has everything I want in fiction: gorgeous writing, fascinating characters I fell in love with, an immersive, addictive story with an ending that made me gasp, then cry. I’m in awe

Sprawling, rootless, and windswept, Flashlight is a psychologically astute and beautifully intimate examination of family tragedy, told from both the micro-perspective of domestic mundanity, and the dizzyingly wide angle of international politics. It reads like a classic, a political thriller, but also a tender portrait of three people who do not fit, yet somehow find themselves to be a family

A shapeshifting novel that reconfigures reality at every turn, Susan Choi’s Flashlight is a powerful beam searching through the cavernous depths of alienation, of the cruel, fierce love binding a singular family, and the historical reverberations of unthinkable displacement and loss. With masterful control, Choi charts us through a journey that defies every expectation—its cumulative effect is epic, devastating, and incandescent

Aube Rey Lescure, author of River East, River West

Susan Choi casts a fascinating light on the troubled borders between identities, countries, historical periods and sometimes even her admirable sentences as she, so expertly, tells the story of a family that can’t quite find its moorings

A major world writer... Choi has a profound gift

Choi’s style conveys that the world, even at its worst, rewards devoted examination

Choi’s elegant writing is evident in this ambitious tale ... A propulsive story about family secrets and displacement

What’s sort of amazing is that a novel with such a locomotive of a plot ... could just as reasonably be described as character-driven ... Choi is a writer you can trust to make the journey worthwhile. Never sentimental, never predictable, this aptly titled novel illuminates dark passages both fictional and real

With Franzen-esque fastidiousness, Choi unpacks each character’s backstory, exposing vanities and delusions in a cool, caustic voice, a 21st century Émile Zola

Proves she’s a writer at the top of her game, capable of crafting a well-plotted and complex story while remaining attuned to small internal motivations, along with intersectional and cultural liminalities, those edges between surf and sand where so much violence happens, as much to bodies as to hearts, minds, and homes

What an outlandishly talented writer Choi is... Choi is a writer who can be trusted to have a plan, and she sews the narrative up with a conclusion that’s almost impossibly heartbreaking — about which the less said the better

A historical events-driven door stopper that will leave readers guessing until (almost) the very end... A fictional reimagining of one of history’s darkest chapters and a sweeping, unsettling portrait of one family caught in the throes of change and torn apart by tragedy

Gorgeous... As the captivating central family mystery is slowly illuminated, Choi’s prose shines with poetry and intelligence

The first major American novel to be published this year

Will make you head spin in the best way

A story that draws on geopolitics even as it obsessively returns to a single family catastrophe... Shocking

Flashlight is that elusive type of book that so many readers I know are always looking for: a big fat novel to get lost in

A captivating examination of family and belonging

Pushes the boundaries of family, ethnicity, society, country, and history by challenging, parsing, and piecing together the complicated multitudes of tangled identities... [Choi] brilliantly shines the titular flashlight on each of her characters, catching their habits and quirks, exposing their intimacies

A meditation on identity and displacement that is full of twists and turns

The most extraordinary book... It's extraordinary how it all weaves together, and the ending is just unbelievable. It's so satisfying, the ending is just heart-breaking, just stunning, it's brilliant

Excellent . . . It generates deep sympathy and understanding . . . In the end it becomes less about the grand narratives than about what it means to be a human being

You don't get many novels that are family dramas and geopolitical thrillers so I think that's something to be celebrated... It is really gripping at times. There are certain revelations that leave you breathless. But it is also heart-breaking... It tore me apart

An engrossing story… what Choi captures so well, even as she pushes the novel to its limits…is what it’s like to live between two worlds

An excellent and impressive novel… the reveal is satisfying and beautifully worked

A novel that is about identity and history that is full of twists

Choi’s great skill lies in her ability to craft the stories of Serk, his child, his wife and his countries into a compelling whole

Sweeping and intimate, breathtakingly ambitious and thrillingly executed

A gripping inquiry into memory, migration and political history

A masterclass in situating the prickly particularity of the individual against the tides of history

A spiky, beautifully crafted, multigenerational exploration of Korea

One evening, ten-year-old Louisa and her father take a walk out on the breakwater. They are spending the summer in a coastal Japanese town while her father Serk, a Korean émigré, completes an academic secondment from his American university. When Louisa wakes hours later, she has washed up on the beach and her father is missing, probably drowned. 
 
The disappearance of Louisa’s father shatters their small family unit. As Louisa and her American mother Anne return to the US, this traumatic event reverberates across time and space, and the mystery of what really happened to Serk slowly unravels.

Susan Choi

Richly detailed . . . Moving from the present to the past, from America to Korea, Choi brings hundreds of small scenes to life

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

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

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

A novel of secrets that unfold like the leaves on an artichoke. The Foreign Student is a mosaic of betrayal in peace and war that marks the debut of a gifted young novelist wise beyond her years

This wonderful hybrid of a novel – a love story, a war story, a novel of manners – introduces a writer of enchanting gifts, a beautiful heart wedded to a beautiful imagination. How else does Susan Choi so fully inhabit characters from disparate backgrounds, with such brilliant wit and insight? The Foreign Student stirs up great and lovely emotions

Francisco Goldman, author of The Ordinary Seaman

A writer I’ve long been – and will always be – eager to read

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.

Susan Choi

Praise for The Foreign Student

Richly detailed . . . Moving from the present to the past, from America to Korea, Choi brings hundreds of small scenes to life

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

Susan Choi writes gracefully, insightfully and with striking maturity

Richly detailed . . . Moving from the present to the past, from America to Korea, Choi brings hundreds of small scenes to life

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

Susan Choi writes gracefully, insightfully and with striking maturity

Richly detailed . . . Moving from the present to the past, from America to Korea, Choi brings hundreds of small scenes to life

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

Susan Choi writes gracefully, insightfully and with striking maturity

Books by Susan Choi

Follow penguin

Follow ladybird

Follow puffin

Sign up to the Penguin newsletter