The Foreign Student

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

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

John Gregory Dunne

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

R. O. Kwon