Trust Exercise

Trust Exercise is a novel by Susan Choi that begins at an elite performing arts high school in an American suburb in the early 1980s. Sarah and David, two first-year theater students, fall into an intense romance under the watchful eye of their charismatic drama teacher, Mr. Kingsley, whose classes blur the line between acting and real life. When the relationship falls apart, its effects ripple through their classmates and the hothouse world of the school. Midway through, the novel shifts in time and perspective, and the story readers thought they understood is told again from a very different point of view. Inventive in structure and sharp about power, memory and storytelling, the book asks who gets to tell a story and what is true in it. It won the 2019 National Book Award for Fiction.