DESCRIPTION

A novel tracing a father’s disappearance across time, nations, and memory, from the author of Trust Exercise.

One summer night, Louisa and her father take a walk on the breakwater. Her father is carrying a flashlight. He cannot swim. Later, Louisa is found on the beach, soaked to the skin, barely alive. Her father is gone. She is ten years old.

Louisa is an only child of parents who have severed themselves from the past. Her father, Serk, is Korean, but was born and raised in Japan; he lost touch with his family when they bought into the promises of postwar Pyongyang and relocated to North Korea. Her American mother, Anne, is estranged from her Midwestern family after a reckless adventure in her youth. And then there is Tobias, Anne’s illegitimate son, whose reappearance in their lives will have astonishing consequences.

But now it is just Anne and Louisa, Louisa and Anne, adrift and facing the challenges of ordinary life in the wake of great loss. United, separated, and also repelled by their mutual grief, they attempt to move on. But they cannot escape the echoes of that night. What really happened to Louisa’s father?

Shifting perspectives across time and character and turning back again and again to that night by the sea, Flashlight chases the shock waves of one family’s catastrophe, even as they are swept up in the invisible currents of history.

A monumental new novel from the National Book Award winner Susan Choi, Flashlight spans decades and continents in a spellbinding, heartgripping investigation of family, loss, memory, and the ways in which we are shaped by what we cannot see.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Susan Choi is the author of Trust Exercise, which received the National Book Award for fiction, as well as the novels The Foreign Student, American Woman, A Person of Interest, and My Education. She is a recipient of the Asian-American Literary Award for fiction, the PEN/W. G. Sebald Award, a Lambda Literary award, the Sunday Times Audible Short Story Award, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation. She teaches in the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University and lives in Brooklyn, New York.

REVIEWS

“Choi has a profound gift, one I find consistently moving . . . [She] is in thrilling command.”
—Dwight Garner, The New York Times

“Franzen-esque . . . The power of Flashlight derives from its exacting psychological portraits, Choi’s reconnaissance through the tradition of social realism, the rich tension between her natural cynicism and a desire for empathy . . . [It] ranks among her best work.”
—Hamilton Cain, Los Angeles Times

“With Flashlight, Susan Choi gets even more ambitious . . . Geopolitics are sharpened to a diamond point . . . Timelines splinter, diverge, and finally . . . come crashing back together with devastating revelations.”
—Ron Charles, The Washington Post

“[Flashlight] will make your head spin in the best way.”
—Dakota Johnson x TeaTime Book Club

“[A] door stopper that will leave readers guessing until (almost) the very end . . . A fictional reimagining of one of history’s darkest chapters and a sweeping, unsettling portrait of one family caught in the throes of change and torn apart by tragedy.”
—Alexis Burling, San Francisco Chronicle