CHOI, Susan. A Person of Interest. Norwalk, Connecticut: The Easton Press, 2014.

Octavo. Full burgundy leather. Spine with three raised bands, 22-carat gilt accents. All edges gilt. Moiré silk endpapers. Satin ribbon page marker. 356 pp. Signed Collector's Edition. Part of the Easton Press Signed Modern Classics series. Signed by the author on the special title page. Includes signed Certificate of Authenticity, edition card, and bookplate adhered to front endpaper. Originally published New York: Viking Press, 2008.

Susan Choi (b. 1969) is one of the most consistently accomplished American novelists of her generation. Born in Indiana to a Korean father and a Jewish-American mother, she studied at Yale and Cornell, and has published five novels over twenty-five years. American Woman (2003), her second novel — a fictionalised account of the Patty Hearst kidnapping — was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Trust Exercise (2019), her fifth, won the National Book Award for Fiction. The Easton Press edition of A Person of Interest was produced in 2014, five years before that recognition; it now carries the additional weight of a signed copy by a National Book Award laureate.

A Person of Interest draws on two of the most unsettling episodes in late twentieth-century American public life: the seventeen-year campaign of the Unabomber, Theodore Kaczynski, who mailed package bombs to scientists, mathematicians, and academics between 1978 and 1995; and the case of Wen Ho Lee, the Taiwanese-American physicist at Los Alamos who in 1999 was accused of passing nuclear secrets to China, held in solitary confinement for nine months, and ultimately cleared of all but one minor charge. From these two cases Choi constructed a novel about suspicion, guilt, and the way in which a life's accumulation of private failures can suddenly become publicly legible in the worst possible way.

Lee — the suggestive surname is the only name by which the novel's protagonist is known — is an ageing Chinese-American mathematics professor at a mid-tier Midwestern university, solitary and bitter after two failed marriages, when the office next to his is destroyed by a mail bomb that kills his colleague. Lee is not the target. He is, however, in proximity to the target, and proximity is enough. As the investigation proceeds he receives a letter from an unidentified figure claiming to be a former colleague, and the novel unspools, in alternating present-tense investigation and past-tense flashback, the history of a friendship destroyed by betrayal and the long consequences of a particular moral failure. The title's law enforcement phrase applies to the narrative in every sense: Lee is the person of interest to the investigators, to the bomber, to the reader, and ultimately to himself.

The novel was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award.

Fine. Presenting as new.

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Catalogue Number: HH000500