Susan Choi [CANCELED]

UPDATE:

This event has been canceled. We apologize for any inconvenience.

Harvard Book Store welcomes award-winning novelist SUSAN CHOI—author of American Woman and My Education—for a discussion of her latest novel, Trust Exercise.

About Trust Exercise

In an American suburb in the early 1980s, students at a highly competitive performing arts high school struggle and thrive in a rarified bubble, ambitiously pursuing music, movement, Shakespeare, and, particularly, their acting classes. When within this striving “Brotherhood of the Arts,” two freshmen, David and Sarah, fall headlong into love, their passion does not go unnoticed―or untoyed with―by anyone, especially not by their charismatic acting teacher, Mr. Kingsley.

The outside world of family life and economic status, of academic pressure and of their future adult lives, fails to penetrate this school’s walls―until it does, in a shocking spiral of events that catapults the action forward in time and flips the premise upside-down. What the reader believes to have happened to David and Sarah and their friends is not entirely true―though it’s not false, either. It takes until the book’s stunning coda for the final piece of the puzzle to fall into place―revealing truths that will resonate long after the final sentence.

As captivating and tender as it is surprising, Trust Exercise will incite heated conversations about fiction and truth, and about friendships and loyalties, and will leave readers with wiser understandings of the true capacities of adolescents and of the powers and responsibilities of adults.

Praise

“As soon as I finished . . . [I was] desperate to talk about the novel with anyone else who’d read it. A startling, perplexing, fascinating book by a writer I’ve long been―and will always be―eager to read.” ―R.O. Kwon, author of The Incendiaries

“Compulsively readable and formally brilliant: this is basically a literary unicorn.” ―Lit Hub

"Superb, powerful . . . Choi’s themes―among them the long reverberations of adolescent experience, the complexities of consent and coercion, and the inherent unreliability of narratives―are timeless and resonant. Fiercely intelligent, impeccably written, and observed with searing insight, this novel is destined to be a classic." ―Publishers Weekly (starred review)