American Woman

Susan Choi author

Format:Paperback

Publisher:Vintage Publishing

Publishing:11th Jun '26

£9.99

This title is due to be published on 11th June, and will be despatched as soon as possible.

American Woman cover

On the run 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.

AmericanWoman explores the psychology of the young radicals, the intensity of their isolated existence, and the paranoia and fear that soon begin to undermine their ideals.

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

ISBN: 9781529960624

Dimensions: 198mm x 129mm x 35mm

Weight: 500g

368 pages