A young woman is drawn into a group of revolutionaries in this stunning novel from the Booker Prize-shortlisted author of Flashlight.

‘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.

The Pulitzer Prize for Fiction Finalist

‘Beautiful… A work of real achievement’ Jennifer Egan

‘Mesmerising’ Vanity Fair

‘Riveting, deeply affecting’ Jhumpa Lahiri

‘Amazing…compelling’ Los Angeles Times

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

Susan Choi is the author of the novels Flashlight, Trust Exercise, My Education, A Person of Interest, American Woman and The Foreign Student. She has won the National Book Award for Fiction, the Asian American Literary Award for Fiction, the PEN/W. G. Sebald Award and a Lambda Literary Award, and has been a finalist for the Booker Prize and the Pulitzer Prize. Flashlight began as a short story and received the Sunday Times Short Story Award. Susan Choi lives in Brooklyn, New York, and teaches in the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University.