“Choi’s descriptions are strange and powerful…. The Foreign Student’s plot is carefully orchestrated and camera-ready. It takes a war, an epistolary betrayal, and a natural disaster to effect a kiss.”
—New York magazine
“First novelist Susan Choi writes in clear, unburnished prose.”
—Washington Post Book World
“It is in Choi’s beautifully detailed evocation of the rich, albeit scarred emotional landscapes of her characters that she is at her best—grave, clear-eyed and artless.”
—Publishers Weekly
“An accomplished, perceptive novel, which invites rereading and lingers in the reader’s memory.”
—Booklist
“So many first novelists write books full of saved-up images and earnest performance, but Choi seems to have put self-interest aside and make a pact with the story about how it wanted to be told. Her allegiance to it is absolute, her prose elegant and self-assured.”
—Arizona Republic
“Choi tells her story with meticulous attention to detail and unfailing self-confidence.”
—Miami Herald
“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
“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
“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 powerful and involving book…[written in] a style that can accommodate both the broad forces of history and the most intimate of lives.”
—Lamar Herrin, author of The Lies Boys Tell