Susan Choi's story of improbable love brings together a displaced Korean student and a rebellious young American woman, two outsiders who seek solace and escape from the afflictions of their pasts. Chang Ahn has experienced first-hand the horrors, political turmoil, and betrayals of the Korean war. Hoping to leave behind his nightmarish memories, Chang escapes from his war-torn country and arrives at the University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee, in August 1955. Unprepared for the totally different world of Sewanee, Chang--nicknamed Chuck--takes pride in his carefully guarded "compact self-sufficiency," practicing his English with the charismatic Professor Charles Addison and deciphering the rules of college life, where he does not quite fit. Then he meets Katherine Monroe, who quickly becomes the unsettling center of his attention. 

The brilliant and impetuous twenty-eight-year-old Katherine is something of a figure in Sewanee. The daughter of a well-to-do Southern family, she has rebelled since childhood against the conventions of family and society, settling in her family's old summer house in Sewanee and into an obsessive affair with Charles Addison, who seduced her when she was fourteen. Estranged from her mother and unhappy with Addison, Katherine is as much a loner and outsider as is Chang. As Katherine and Chang struggle with their respective histories and move toward love and mutual understanding, alternating chapters reveal the details of their pasts. Harrowing accounts of Chang's experiences in Korea are juxtaposed with troubling revelations of Katherine's childhood and young adult years; both contribute to our understanding of who they are and where they may be going between the autumn of 1955 and the summer of 1956. And as their stories unfold, we gradually come to understand both the seemingly impassable differences and the surprising affinities between them as well.