Two outsiders are drawn together in a powerful, emotionally gripping story of love and war – the debut novel from the Booker Prize-shortlisted author

‘A major world writer’ New York Times

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.

‘Epic and intimate’ The New Yorker

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

‘Elegantly wrought’ Vanity Fair

"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

"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