Description

A young fugitive is drawn into a group of revolutionaries in this stunning, Pulitzer Prize-nominated novel.

‘I couldn’t put American Woman down’ Joan Didion

‘A fascinating portrait of dangerous fragility’ New York Times

On the run after an act of violence against the American government, twenty-five-year-old Jenny Shimada is drawn into caring for three younger fugitives. One of them, the kidnapped granddaughter of a San Francisco millionaire, has become a national celebrity for joining her captors’ revolutionary cell.

Yet as Jenny and her charges pursue their destinies from an old farmhouse in upstate New York to California, isolation turns to paranoia and their radical ideals soon begin to fracture.

‘Beautiful… A work of real achievement’ Jennifer Egan

‘Mesmerising’ Vanity Fair

‘Riveting, deeply affecting’ Jhumpa Lahiri

‘Amazing…compelling’ Los Angeles Times

Publisher Review

Susan Choi . . . proves herself a natural - a writer whose intelligence and historical awareness effortlessly serve a breathtaking narrative ability. I couldn't put American Woman down, and wanted when I finished it to do nothing but read it again -- Joan Didion Prepare to be held hostage by Susan Choi's mesmerizing American Woman * Vanity Fair * Riveting . . . Choi has the rare gift of bringing such notorious moments of history back to life and making them altogether new * Vogue * With uncompromising grace and mastery, Susan Choi renders the intimate moments which bring to life a tale of prodigious sweep -- Jhumpa Lahiri Deeply impressive: confident, historically astute, psychologically persuasive . . . beautiful . . . a work of real achievement -- Jennifer Egan In the manner of Don DeLillo's 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 * New York Times Book Review * Masterfully plotted . . . American Woman is that rarest of creations, a political novel that gives equal weight to its characters' inner and outer lives * Salon * Takes a hard-eyed look at American idealism, and yet its imaginative abundance, its fascination with self invention and its portrayal of the landscape as a living, breathing presence provide a quintessentially American sense of possibility * The New Yorker * Historical sweep and startling particular shrewdness . . . Choi has written a fascinating portrait of dangerous fragility * New York Times * Few writers since Graham Greene have brought such tender, insightful, poetic, intelligent, darkly comic writing to the political thriller -- Francisco Goldman