Serpent’s Tail signs 'timely' new novel by Susan Choi

Serpent’s Tail has acquired Trust Exercise, the "timely" new novel by American writer Susan Choi.

Hannah Westland, publisher at Serpent’s Tail, acquired UK & Commonwealth rights from the Wylie Agency. Serpent’s Tail will publish in Spring/Summer 2019. The North American rights have been sold to Barbara Jones at Henry Holt.

Described as "electrifyingly good" and "compulsively readable", the novel takes the reader into the "intensely charged" world of teenage relationships and their lifelong repercussions, and provides a "profound and nuanced contribution to the vital conversations we are having about the complexities of sex, power and consent".

Westland said: "It is an important book and deserves to be read, shared and discussed widely next year. It completely blew me away and I cannot wait to press it into people’s hands."

Choi added: "I am absolutely thrilled to be published by Serpent's Tail, in the company of so many extraordinary writers whose ferociously intelligent, provocative works are among the recent novels I admire the most."

Choi is based in Brooklyn, New York and is currently teaching in the MFA program at NYU. Her first novel, The Foreign Student (US Impots), won the Asian-American Literary Award for fiction, and her second novel, American Woman Harper Perennial), was a finalist for the 2004 Pulitzer Prize. Her third novel, A Person of Interest (Penguin Press), was a finalist for the 2009 PEN/Faulkner Award.

In 2010 she was named the inaugural recipient of the PEN/W.G. Sebald Award. Her fourth novel, My Education (Short Books), won a 2014 Lambda Literary Award for Bisexual Fiction. She's also a recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation.