Flashlight
A Novel
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4.0 • 71 Ratings
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: The New Yorker • Time • New York • The Washington Post • NPR • Los Angeles Times • The Guardian • Vanity Fair • Town & Country • Oprah Daily • Financial Times • The Economist • Book Riot • Kirkus Reviews • Electric Literature • PEN America • The Chicago Public Library
“EXPLOSIVE.” (The New York Times Book Review) • “GORGEOUS.” (New York) • “SHOCKING.” (NPR) • “DEVASTATING.” (The Washington Post) • “ASTONISHING.” (The Atlantic) • “MARVELOUS.” (NBC’s Weekend Today in New York)
One of President Obama's Favorite Books of 2025
Short-listed for the Booker Prize • Long-listed for the National Book Award • Long-listed for the Andrew Carnegie Medal
A TeaTime and Get Lit Book Club Pick
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 family. But now it is just Anne and Louisa, adrift and facing the challenges of ordinary life in the wake of catastrophe. 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?
A monumental new novel from the National Book Award winner Susan Choi, Flashlight spans decades and continents in a spellbinding, heart-gripping investigation of family, loss, memory, and the ways in which we are shaped by what we cannot see.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
Family, identity, and the unexpected turns of history all play a part in this ambitious, audacious novel from Susan Choi. Serk was born to a Korean family living in Japan during wartime. His parents eventually relocated to North Korea, but to Serk, the notion of following them to a “home” he’s never even seen fills him with outrage. Meanwhile, as he’s studying in the United States, he meets and marries Anne, who’s estranged from her own parents as well, and the couple eventually have a daughter, the bright and contrary Louisa. We were swept away by the separate backstories of Anne and Serk, but things take an even more dramatic turn when Serk tragically and mysteriously drowns, throwing his wife and daughter’s lives into chaos. Choi’s plotting often takes you in unexpected directions as the story unfolds in smart, exciting, and engrossing ways—ways that reward you for paying extra-close attention. This is one of the most startlingly original novels of 2025.
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.
Customer Reviews
Fascinating
Captivating decades-long family saga sweeping across political history, geographies, and cultures, filled with raw emotions and complex relationships. Hard to put down even when it sometimes dwells too long on a theme. Writing is fresh and the twists are fascinating. Definitely a short lister and maybe even a Booker winner!
Would have been better written as non-fiction
If Susan Choi wanted to write about North Korea, it would have been a fascinating book of non-fiction about real people. Reading about fictional characters in such irrelevant detail just to find the real topic was something else made the details of the fiction portion tedious and irrelevant. I picked up this book because I loved Trust Exercise. This didn’t feel like the same writer.