The Foreign Student

A young Korean man scarred by war finds unlikely love in the American South in the National Book Award–winning author’s acclaimed debut novel.

Tennessee, 1955. When Chuck Ahn arrives in Sewanee to begin his studies at the University of the South, he is shy and speaks English haltingly. On the subject of his earlier life in Korea, he will not speak at all. Then he meets Katherine Monroe, a beautiful and solitary young woman who, like Chuck, is haunted by some dark episode in her past.

Without quite knowing why, these two outsiders are drawn together, each sensing in the other the possibility of salvation. Moving between the American South and South Korea, between an adolescent girl’s sexual awakening and a young man’s nightmarish memories of war, The Foreign Student is a powerful and emotionally gripping work of fiction.

“An auspicious debut.” —The New Yorker