Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:
"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.
Reviews provided by Syndetics
Library Journal Review
Inspired by and building off the framework of Choi's 2020 short story of the same name, this much-anticipated novel spotlights the National Book Award-winning author's gift for illuminating the twisty, psychological aspects of identities and relationships. The story begins with a walk on the beach--10-year-old Louisa and her father talking as they stroll by the water, guided by the father's flashlight. Readers get the briefest glimpse of their conversation: the father telling Louisa that her mother gave her a gift in teaching her to swim. The next morning, in the next narrative moment, he has disappeared, and Louisa has washed up on the shore, barely alive. As the story rolls in and out with both tidal force and quiet currents, it shifts between past and present, each wave receding to reveal cultural and generational dislocation, all of which converges when past crashes into present. VERDICT 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.--Emily Bowles
Publishers Weekly Review
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. Agent: Jin Auh, Wylie Agency. (June)
Booklist Review
Choi's (Trust Exercise, 2019) latest novel feels leisurely as she brilliantly shines the titular flashlight on each of her characters, catching their habits and quirks, exposing their intimacies. That flashlight (as both leitmotif and physical object) appears in the prologue as 10-year-old Louisa and her father, carrying the light as precaution, take a walk along a coastal breakwater in Japan, where the family--Louisa, her white mother Anne, and her ethnic-Korean, Japanese born and raised father with his multiple appellations (Seok to his birth family, Hiroshi to the Japanese, and Serk in the U.S.)--is temporarily living. That night, he disappears, and Louisa is found alone, washed up on shore. Mother and daughter return to the U.S. to pick up their lives, but Louisa was mostly Serk's child and can barely tolerate being tethered to Anne. After falling mysteriously ill, Anne is diagnosed with MS and slowly disintegrates. Her estranged firstborn child, Tobias, with whom she briefly reunited when he was a teen, sporadically appears and disappears through the decades but proves remarkably pivotal in addressing dysfunctional, multigenerational needs and losses. Choi, also the progeny of a Korean father and white American mother, pushes the boundaries of family, ethnicity, society, country, and history by challenging, parsing, and piecing together the complicated multitudes of tangled identities. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Choi's first novel since the National Book Award--winning Trust Exercise (2019) is already racking up high ratings on Goodreads and NetGalley. Prepare for demand!
Kirkus Book Review
A troubled American family suffers an insuperable loss during a year abroad. While Choi's latest--a domestic drama with deep roots in 75 years of geopolitics--has little in common with her previous novel, the National Book Award--winning coming-of-age storyTrust Exercise (2019), it does share one characteristic with that book: Only so much can be said about its explosively twisty plot without spoilers. What's sort of amazing is that a novel with such a locomotive of a plot--and give it a chance, because it doesn't rev up right away--could just as reasonably be described as character-driven, devoted to unfurling the personalities and destinies of its three point-of-view characters, Serk, Anne, and Louisa Kang. Serk is an ethnic Korean born in Japan; his family was among those thrust into chaos by the regime changes of the 1940s and he ends up moving on his own to the United States to purse an academic career. There he meets Anne, a white Midwesterner whose teenage fling with a married man resulted in the birth of a son she barely saw before he was taken away; 10 years later, her marriage to Serk produces a daughter, Louisa, who's at the center of the storm that is this novel. Though she is never a happy or easy child, her life will go from merely bad to unbearable in the middle of fourth grade, when she's forced to go to Japan for her father's visiting professorship. While Serk and Louisa are walking by the sea one night, something happens. The girl is found half-dead on the beach with few clear memories, and her father has disappeared; it is concluded that he has drowned. Louisa and Anne have many more challenges over the decades ahead, including serious chronic illness for Anne and a nearly disastrous college trip to Europe for Louisa, but one thing they will never have is a real connection. 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. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
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