Description: In 1955, a new student arrives in the middle of the night at a small college in the Tennessee mountains. Chuck is shy, he speaks English haltingly, and on the subject of his earlier life in Korea he will not speak at all. Then he meets a beautiful and solitary woman named Katherine. Like Chuck, Katherine is haunted by an episode from her past: a destructive affair with a charismatic English professor that began when she was 14 years old, and from which she has never been able to escape. Without quite knowing why, these two outsiders are drawn together, each sensing in the other the possibility, of a new freedom. The Foreign Student moves between the American South and South Korea, between an adolescent girl's sexual awakening and a young man's nightmarish experience of war. Assured and beautifully written, The Foreign Student is a powerful first novel about survival, fate, and memory.

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