American Woman

On the lam for an act of violence against the American government, 25-year-old Jenny Shimada agrees to care for three younger fugitives whom a shadowy figure from her former radical life has spirited out of California. One of them, the kidnapped granddaughter of a wealthy newspaper magnate in San Francisco, has become a national celebrity for embracing her captors' ideology and joining their revolutionary cell.

“A tightly plotted thriller that is also an imaginative thought experiment conducted with the past….Brilliant and often hilarious.”
—Chicago Tribune

“I couldn’t put American Woman down.”
—Joan Didion

“In the manner of Don DeLillo in 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.” 
—Sven Birkerts, New York Times Book Review (cover)

The Foreign Student

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 will not speak at all. Then he meets Katherine, a beautiful and solitary young woman haunted by an episode in her past. Without knowing why, these two outsiders are drawn together, each sensing in the other the possibility of salvation.

“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 luminous and accomplished first novel…that resonates with compassion-turned-ardor and an addictive melancholy vibrating beneath every line.”
—Houston Chronicle

“A novel of extraordinary sensibility and transforming
strangeness.”
—Richard Eder, Los Angeles Times Book Review