The Foreign Student

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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.

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

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

About Susan Choi

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.

Details

Imprint: Vintage Digital
Published: 23/04/2026
ISBN: 9781529960617
Length: 336 pages
Price: £5.99

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The Foreign Student

Format:

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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

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

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

About Susan Choi

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