Flashlight - by Susan Choi (Hardcover)

About the Book

"A thrilling, globe-spanning novel on memory, identity, and what it means to be in a family (and to lose one), from the award-winning author of Trust Exercise"--

Book Synopsis

"The first major American novel to be published this year." --Sam Sacks, The Wall Street Journal
"Gorgeous . . . Almost impossibly heartbreaking." --Sam Worley, New York Magazine

A Must-Read: The New York Times, New York Magazine, Time, The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, The Boston Globe, Entertainment Weekly, USA Today, The Chicago Review of Books, Forbes, Literary Hub, and Town & Country

"A major world writer . . . Choi is in thrilling command." ―Dwight Garner, The New York Times
"Devastating." --Ron Charles, The Washington Post
"Ranks among her best work." --Hamilton Cain, Los Angeles Times

A Dakota Johnson X TeaTime Book Club Pick

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.

Review Quotes

"Epic . . . Captivating . . . Choi's prose shines with poetry and intelligence."
--Jasmine Vojdani, New York Magazine

"[Flashlight] will make your head spin in the best way."
--Dakota Johnson x TeaTime Book Club

"Pack[s] an astonishing amount of beauty and meaning."
--Lily Meyer, The Atlantic

"A story that draws on geopolitics even as it obsessively returns to a single family catastrophe . . . Shocking."
--Colin Dwyer, NPR's The Book Ahead

"Slippery and explosive."
--Miguel Salazar and Laura Thompson, The New York Times Book Review

"[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

"In Choi's novels, memory is fallible, people are not always who they seem to be, and the past can always be counted on to force its way back into the present. This makes her books hard to write about but a lot of fun to think about and to read."
--Emily Gould, New York Magazine's "Book Gossip"

"One of Choi's longer novels, so it gives you a little more to chew into in the summer if you're looking for that weeklong read . . . And she's just a wonderful stylist . . . and really understands a lot about family dynamics and inner psychology."
--John Williams, The Washington Post's "Post Reports"

"Magnificent . . . An ode to the difficult choices we make to build a life and the ways in which they all can come falling down in a moment."
--Michael Welch, Chicago Review of Books

"Choi's elegant writing is evident in this ambitious tale . . . A propulsive story about family secrets and displacement."
--Wadzanai Mhute, The Boston Globe

"A great big ambitious novel . . . Flashlight is that elusive type of book that so many readers I know are always looking for: a big fat novel to get lost in."
--Maris Kreizman, The Maris Review

"A whodunit with geopolitical implications and all the brutal big feelings of familial drama."
--Madeline Leung Coleman, New York Magazine

"A captivating examination of family and belonging."
--Entertainment Weekly

"Aching, beautiful, utterly compelling."
--Dan Sheehan, Literary Hub

"[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

"An astute portrait of political upheaval, family dynamics and the constant need to recalibrate one's expectations. The novel is an intellectual work-out, but a rewarding one."
--Michael Magras, BookPage

"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

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.