Vogue
... cultural provocateur a la DeLillo, but with a keen sense of psychological nuance. . . . Choi has the all-too-rare talent of making the political feel unsettlingly personal.
Dallas Morning News
[T]errible honesty, surrounded by unanswered questions, is what makes Susan Choi's third novel so compelling.
Francine Prose
We read ‘A Person of Interest' for one of the best reasons to read any fiction: to transcend the limitations of our own lives, to find out what it's like to be someone else, to recognize unmistakable aspects of ourselves staring back at us from the portrait of a stranger.
The New York Times Book Review
Los Angeles Times
Choi deftly turns our gaze away from the obvious and takes us on a complicated and revealing journey into the alienated heart of modern American life ... Choi juggles suspense and psychological drama with an acrobatic dexterity.
Time Out New York
Engrossing, intricately plotted . . . . While A Person of Interest crackles with the sensationalism of the actual Unabomber events, it is anchored by its quiet portrait of a man in the melancholic twilight of his career, beset with regrets and professional jealousies.
San Francisco Chronicle
Choi's writing probes the depths of Lee's consciousness, as well as the collective consciousness of his small town, and reveals things about Lee he has not yet bothered to articulate to himself. . . . What is compelling about Choi's characterizations is her sense of restraint . . . A Person of Interest is psychologically rich. The relationships fleshed out in Lee's life – especially his romance with his first wife, and the conflicts in and around their marriage – are moving and compelling. The novel is a testament to Choi's deft handling of her material. She reworks the classic detective novel as literary fiction, and shows how, given the right set of circumstances, any one of us could be labeled ‘a person of interest.'
Village Voice
Stunning . . . Choi's writing is elegant and surprisingly expansive.
GQ
Pulitzer Prize finalist Susan Choi returns with a straight-up thriller ... gripping, smart.
Cleveland Plain-Dealer
Choi is wonderful at limning how strangeness roots in loneliness. . . . A Person of Interest brims with gifted writing, masterful observation, and propulsive plot. It sends Lee out to help solve the identity of the bomber, a role far more satisfactory than any lawsuit. In the barricaded past that the bombing stirs up, Lee finds a way to reassemble something essential, making for an unorthodox and deeply moving tale. The year is young, but A Person of Interest is the best new novel I've read in 2008.
Salon
Masterful. . . . Choi seems to be working in a genre all her own: politically astute, historically based, and dramatically propulsive. [T]he suspense is solidly grounded in character, not ‘twists.' Its engine is the anxiety of a man whose sense of himself must be dismantled if he's going to survive, who only gets his life back after a maniac blows it up.
Poets & Writers
No matter the year in which her novels are set, Choi's subject is contemporary American as much as it is America's past. The result is historical fiction with present-day relevance.
Donna Seaman
Tenured math professor Lee has been teaching at a midwestern university for ages, yet he is utterly isolated within a web of anger and regret. When the popular young department star is gravely injured by a mail bomb, Lee is physically unharmed but psychically devastated. Assailed by painful memories of his affair with his only friend's wife and his own failed marriages, Lee, whose Asian backgroun is left deliberately vague, is completely undone when he becomes a person of interest to the FBI. How he handles the hostility of his colleagues and the invasion of his privacy by the government and the press is the engine that drives this intricately psychological novel's brainy suspense, while the slow unveiling of his past tells a staggering story of love betrayed. Choi follows the game plan of her lauded second novel, American Woman (2003), a takeoff on the Patty Hearst story, venturing here, albeit superficially, into Unabomber territory. Lee is unconvincing as a mathematician but mesmerizing in his ineptness and anguish. Subtle humor, emotional acuity, and breathtaking plot twists keep this tale of wounding secrets rolling as Choi's brilliant calculus of revelation and forgiveness delivers a triumphant conclusion.
Booklist
O The Oprah Magazine
[An] eloquent, penetrating novel . . . Behind the headlines that trigger Choi's imagination, she sees intricate, difficult lives; she sees romance and error and dignity and painand finally, as with Lee, she sees the possibility for redemption.
Washington City Paper
If Henry James had lived in the age of pulp noirs, he might have wound up writing books a little like Susan Choi's third novel, A Person of Interest. . . . Choi's paragraphs are heavy, dense, carefully shaped mini-essays . . . her portrait of Lee's paranoia is . . . exacting and affecting.
Minneapolis Star-Tribune
Susan Choi ... is a writer with rare gifts. She has an eye for the telling details that reveal complicated, fully developed characters as well as an equally acute sensitivity for the times we live in.
New York Sun
Engrossing . . . masterful.
Bloomberg News
Beneath . . . less-than-cheery broad strokes Choi places a rich layer of well- chosen details.
Washington Post
Choi's work unfolds like a Dostoyevskian study of guilt and self-doubt, plumbing the depths of the paranoia that ensues when one's identity is threatened.
The Village Voice
Stunning. . . A Person of Interest succeeds on so many levels: as character study, as literary thriller, but most of all, as an inquest into what constitutes identity.
Minneapolis Star Tribune
Susan Choi's "A Person of Interest" has all the fine ingredients of a page-turner, but its true power lies in its subtle psychological depiction of alienation, guilt and redemption in these edgy times of mistrust and public paranoia. Choi, whose "American Woman" was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 2004, is a writer with rare gifts. She has an eye for the telling details that reveal complicated, fully developed characters as well as an equally acute sensitivity for the times we live in. "A Person of Interest" never loses its way, as Choi propels the story in a narrative style that is clear, confident and at times lyrical.
Marx Swanholm,
The Oprah Magazine O
An explosive story of a mad bomber and a suspect scientist: In Choi's eloquent, penetrating novel, the two stories are brought together . . . Behind the headlines that trigger Choi's imagination, she sees intricate, difficult lives; she sees romance and error and dignity and pain--and finally, as with Lee, she sees the possibility for redemption.
Kirkus Reviews
Choi (The Foreign Student, 1998, etc.) draws on the Unabomber case for her awkward third novel, about a campus bombing and a beleaguered Asian-American professor. Lee is an aging tenured math professor at an undistinguished state university in the Midwest. The adjoining office belongs to Rick Hendley, a much younger man with a much bigger reputation, a hotshot computer scientist loved by his students and envied by the unloved Lee. When a mail bomb explodes in Hendley's face, Lee feels a "terrible gladness." He does not visit Hendley in the hospital; when the man dies, he does not attend the campus memorial service. Petty and self-absorbed, Lee is no nicer now than he was all those years ago in grad school, when he was befriended by an evangelizing Christian, Lewis Gaither, and promptly stole his wife Aileen. Out of the blue, a letter arrives from Gaither, suggesting they resume their friendship. Could there be a connection between this letter and the bombing? An FBI agent seems to think so, and his suspicions are intensified when Lee lies to him about his relationship with Gaither. Choi alternates between the investigation and Lee's marriage to Aileen, doomed once Lee refused to show any interest in her baby John, fathered by Gaither, who later absconded with him. This can of worms acts as a severe distraction from Lee's current troubles, which multiply once the FBI declares him a person of interest (though not a suspect) and the media and neighbors harass him. (Echoes here of the Richard Jewell/1996 Atlanta Olympics story.) The abrupt introduction of the now adult John is a further distraction. The story does gain some momentum with Lee's cross-country dash to rendezvous with Gaither,who has now issued a Manifesto, like the Unabomber. But the climax, in the snowy Idaho woods, defies belief on several counts, among them Lee's last-minute makeover as a potential martyr. Lee's soul is too small to carry the novel, despite the author's astute observations.
From the Publisher
"A tour de force . . . universal and raw and irresistibly sympathetic."
-The Washington Post Book World
"With nuance, psychological acuity, and pitch-perfect writing, she tells the large-canvas story of paranoia in the age of terror and the smaller (but no less important) story of the cost of failed dreams and the damage we do to one another in the name of love."
-Los Angeles Times
"Read A Person of Interest for one of the best reasons to read any fiction: to transcend the limitations of our own lives, to find out what it's like to be someone else, to recognize unmistakable aspects of ourselves staring back at us from the portrait of a stranger."
-Francine Prose, The New York Times Book Review