WINNER OF THE 2019 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR FICTION
'“Zing will go certain taut strings in your chest. . . . Choi builds her novel carefully, but it is packed with wild moments of grace and fear and abandon. . . . a phosphorescent examination of sexual consent.”
—Dwight Garner, The New York Times
”Many novels teach their readers how to read them; the reader of this one must learn something else—to stay with the not-knowing long enough to find the truth.”
—Joanna Biggs, The New Yorker
“Mind-bending. . . . It flexes its own meta-existence—as a novel about the manipulation inherent in any kind of narrative—brilliantly.”
—Hillary Kelly, New York Magazine
NAMED A BEST BOOK OF 2019 by The Chicago Tribune, The Washington Post, Elle, Buzzfeed, Entertainment Weekly, Vanity Fair, New York Magazine, Los Angeles Times, Bustle, Refinery29, Town & Country, Cosmopolitan, The Millions, and TIME
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With lyrical prose and dazzling art, Pulitzer Prize finalist Susan Choi and Caldecott-honor winning artist John Rocco have created a moving and joyful ode to growing up.
“[A] resonant tale of family connectedness, burgeoning independence, and embracing the new and unknown.”
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“A little boy finds his inner tiger in this lyrical picture-book debut by Choi, an award-winning author for adults....Elongated sentences demand that readers linger on each page drinking in every detail of the tiger's striking portraits.”
—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
“Youngsters will thrill at the possibilities presented in Pulitzer finalist Choi’s tale, which combines fantasy with the everyday.”
—Booklist (starred review)
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Susan Choi’s first novel, The Foreign Student, won the Asian-American Literary Award for fiction. Her second novel, American Woman, was a finalist for the 2004 Pulitzer Prize. Her third novel, A Person of Interest, was a finalist for the 2009 PEN/Faulkner Award. In 2010 she was named the inaugural recipient of the PEN/W.G. Sebald Award. Her fourth novel, My Education, received a 2014 Lammy Award. Her fifth novel, Trust Exercise, won the 2019 National Book Award for Fiction, and in 2021 she received the Sunday Times Audible Short Story Award for “Flashlight.” She serves as a trustee of PEN America and teaches in The Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University.
