Flashlight
A Novel
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- Reserva
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- Lanzamiento previsto: 3 jun 2025
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- 12,99 €
Descripción editorial
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?
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The ambitious if digressive latest from National Book Award winner Choi (Trust Exercise) spans multiple continents and perspectives in its exploration of a family mystery. Serk, an ethnic Korean man raised in Japan, immigrates to an East Coast college town in the U.S. in the 1960s. There, he meets a young seeker named Anne, and they marry and have a daughter, Louisa. Serk and Anne are both estranged from their families, and their marriage is soon defined by its own tragic and abrupt separation. When Louisa is 10, she and her father go for a walk along the beach while visiting Japan. Though she remembers nothing of the night in question, Louisa is found half drowned the next day, and her father is missing and presumed dead. As Louisa and Anne attempt to move on with their lives, it becomes clear that Serk's disappearance is not what it seemed on first impression. 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, particularly as she sharply delineates the difficult relationship between Louisa and Anne, who often treat each other more like housemates or acquaintances than mother and daughter. This gripping story of a family in crisis is tough to shake.
