Trust Exercise

“[Trust Exercise] burns more brightly than anything [Choi’s] yet written. This psychologically acute novel enlists your heart as well as your mind. Zing will go certain taut strings in your chest . . . Choi builds her novel carefully, but it is packed with wild moments of grace and fear and abandon . . . [A] delicious and, in its way, rather delicate . . . phosphorescent examination of sexual consent.”—The New York Times

“An intelligent and layered portrait of a school’s legacy . . . [Trust Exercise] makes something dramatic and memorable from the simple elements of a teen movie.”—The New Yorker

“Mind-bending . . . A Gen-X bildungsroman that speaks to young generations, a Russian nesting doll of unreliable narrators, and a slippery #MeToo puzzle-box about the fallibility of memory . . . [Trust Exercise is] a perfectly stitched together Frankenstein’s monster of narrative introspection and ambiguity . . . It flexes its own meta-existence—as a novel about the manipulation inherent in any kind of narrative—brilliantly.”—New York Magazine

“A rare and splendid literary creature: piercingly intelligent, engrossingly entertaining, and so masterfully intricate that only after you finish it, stunned, can you step back and marvel.”—The Boston Globe

“Immerses the reader in the suffocating hothouse atmosphere of a 1980s performing arts high school and all the intense drama, heartbreak, and scandal many remember from their teen years.”—Los Angeles Times

“Choi’s voice blends an adolescent’s awe with an adult’s irony. It’s a letter-perfect satire of the special strain of egotism and obsession that can fester in academic settings . . . [Choi is] a master of emotional pacing: the sudden revelation, the unexpected attack . . . How cunningly this novel considers the way teenage sexuality is experienced, manipulated, and remembered . . . The result is a dramatic exploration of the distorting forces of memory, envy, and art . . . You won’t be disappointed.”—The Washington Post

“Brilliant . . . Trust Exercise deftly shifts time and perspective, and teen drama becomes a dark, edgy exploration of boundaries between coercion and consent, theater and reality, charisma and manipulation, and student and teacher.”—The National Book Review

“Book groups, meet your next selection . . . Trust Exercise is fiction that contains multiple truths and lies. Working with such common material, Choi has produced something uncommonly thought-provoking.”—NPR

“A twisting feat of storytelling . . . [Choi] uses language brilliantly . . . She is an astute, forensic cartographer of human nature; her characters are both sympathetic and appalling. In the end, [Trust Exercise] is a tale of missed connection and manipulation—and of willing surrender to the lure and peril of the unknown.”—The Economist

“Perhaps the best [novel] this year . . . [Trust Exercise] begins as an enthralling tale of teenage romance and then turns into a meticulously plotted interrogation of the state of the novel itself . . . Read it once for pleasure, and then again to turn up all the brilliant Easter eggs.”—Vulture

“Electrifying . . . [A] story that cuts to the heart of gender politics and the teacher-student dynamic.”—People

“A gonzo literary performance one could mistake for a magic trick, duping its readers with glee before leaving them impossibly moved . . . Facts are debated in Trust Exercise, yes, but Choi always tells the truth.”—Entertainment Weekly

“In her masterful, twisty [novel], Susan Choi upgrades the familiar coming-of-age story with remarkable command . . . [displaying her] talent for taking ineffable emotions and giving them an oaken solidity . . . So many books and films present teenage years as a passing phase, a hormonal storm that passes in time. Choi, in this witty and resonant novel, thinks of it more like an earthquake—a rupture that damages our internal foundations and can require years to repair.”—USA Today

"This twisty novel . . . seems a straightforward enough story—until the roller-coaster second half makes you doubt everything that came before."—Marie Claire

"What begins as the story of obsessive first love between drama students at a competitive performing arts high school in the early 1980s twists into something much darker in Choi's singular new novel . . . an effective interrogation of memory, the impossible gulf between accuracy and the stories we tell . . . The writing (exquisite) and the observations (cuttingly accurate) make Choi's latest both wrenching and one-of-a-kind. Never sentimental; always thrillingly alive."—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

“[Choi’s] finest novel . . . Trust Exercise should immediately put readers on alert . . . exposing tenuous connections between fiction, truth, lies, and, of course, people. Literary deception rarely reads this well.”—Booklist (starred review)

"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)