
This title will be released on:
Jun 3, 2025
Description
A Most Anticipated Book of the Year: Time, The Washington Post, and Literary Hub
A novel tracing a father’s disappearance across time, nations, and memory, from the author of Trust Exercise.
One night, Louisa and her father take a walk on the beach. He’s carrying a flashlight. He cannot swim. Later Louisa is found washed up by the tide, barely alive. Her father is gone. She is ten years old.
In chapters that shift from one member to the next, turning back again and again to that night by the sea, Susan Choi's Flashlight chases the shockwaves of one family’s catastrophe. Louisa is an only child of parents who have severed themselves from the past. Her father, Serk, an ethnic Korean born and raised in Japan, lost touch with his family when they bought into the promises of postwar Pyongyang and relocated to the DPRK. Her American mother, Anne, is estranged from her 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.
What really happened to Louisa’s father? Why did he take Louisa and her mother to Japan just before he disappeared? And how can we love, or make sense of our lives, when there’s so much we can’t see?
Product Details
Publisher | Farrar, Straus and Giroux |
Publish Date | June 03, 2025 |
Pages | 464 |
Language | English |
Type | |
EAN/UPC | 9780374616373 |
Dimensions | 9.3 X 162.6 X 35.6 inches | 1.5 pounds |
About the Author
Reviews
“[Flashlight] pushes the boundaries of family, ethnicity, society, country, and history by challenging, parsing, and piecing together the complicated multitudes of tangled identities . . . [Choi] brilliantly shines the titular flashlight on each of her characters, catching their habits and quirks, exposing their intimacies.”
—Terry Hong, Booklist (starred review)
“[Choi is] a writer at the top of her game, capable of crafting a well-plotted and complex story while remaining attuned to small internal motivations, along with intersectional and cultural liminalities, those edges between surf and sand where so much violence happens, as much to bodies as to hearts, minds, and homes.”
—Emily Bowles, Library Journal
“In this gripping novel, Susan Choi’s seemingly disparate clues coalesce in a tale of espionage and global conflict, and the heartrending ways in which world struggles play out in individual lives.”
—Jennifer Brown, Shelf Awareness
“[Flashlight] has important things to say, and Choi is a writer you can trust to make the journey worthwhile. Never sentimental, never predictable, this aptly titled novel illuminates dark passages both fictional and real.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“This gripping story of a family in crisis is tough to shake.”
—Publishers Weekly
“Flashlight is instantly bewitching: a mysterious family tragedy whose solution reaches beyond psychology into geopolitics. Susan Choi’s fictional investigation reveals a writer at the height of her spectacular powers.”
—Jennifer Egan, author of The Candy House
“In this superbly crafted book, the fraught geopolitics of family life—the official secrets, the acts of espionage, the diplomatic failures—are set against the intimacies, grievances, conflicting memories, and unmet needs of national allegiance. Ferociously smart and full of surprises, Flashlight is thrilling to the last.”
—Eleanor Catton, author of Birnam Wood
“In a brilliant feat of storytelling, both intimate and sweeping, Susan Choi has created a profoundly moving epic that blends a tender family portrait with a haunting examination of the Korean diaspora. Flashlight is that rare novel that has everything I want in fiction: gorgeous writing, fascinating characters I fell in love with, an immersive, addictive story with an ending that made me gasp, then cry. I’m in awe.”
—Angie Kim, author of Happiness Falls
“Flashlight is a sensitive familial portrait, rigorous in its scope and complexity of feeling. Susan Choi is a master of rendering relationships with utter particularity.”
—Raven Leilani, author of Luster
“I devoured Flashlight. Once I started reading, I couldn’t put it down, and once I finished, I couldn’t stop thinking about it. The plot builds like a symphony rising to a crescendo, full of surprise and wonder. The story is as astonishing as it is entirely plausible. Susan Choi clearly knows well the fraught geopolitics of Korea and Japan, and did her homework.”
—Barbara Demick, author of Nothing to Envy and Daughters of the Bamboo Grove
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