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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?
"This is not an easy novel, but it 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
"Though long sections of character development often fail to gel with the main events, Choi's well-shaded characters are also the book's strongest element...This gripping story of a family in crisis is tough to shake." —Publishers Weekly
"Choi's follow-up to Trust Exercises proves she's 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." —Library Journal
"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
This information about Flashlight was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Heather Weston
Susan Choi is the author of the novels My Education, A Person of Interest, American Woman, and The Foreign Student. Her work has been a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award and winner of the PEN/W.G. Sebald Award and the Asian-American Literary Award for fiction. With David Remnick, she co-edited Wonderful Town: New York Stories from The New Yorker. She's received NEA and Guggenheim Foundation fellowships. She lives in Brooklyn.
Name Pronunciation
Susan Choi: choy
Happy Land
by Dolen Perkins-Valdez
From the New York Times bestselling author, a novel about a family's secret ties to a vanished American Kingdom.
Fanaticism consists in redoubling your effort when you have forgotten your aim
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