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  • Published: 11 June 2026
  • ISBN: 9781529960648
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 416

American Woman




A young woman is drawn into a group of revolutionaries in the dazzling, Pulitzer-nominated novel from the Booker-longlisted author of Flashlight

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.

American Woman 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.

  • Published: 11 June 2026
  • ISBN: 9781529960648
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 416

About the author

Susan Choi

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.

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Praise for American Woman

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

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

With uncompromising grace and mastery, Susan Choi renders the intimate moments which bring to life a tale of prodigious sweep

Jhumpa Lahiri

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
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