FLASHLIGHT
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.
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.
- Picador
- Paperback
- May 2026
- 464 Pages
- 9781250437822
Buy the Book
$19.00
About Susan Choi
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.
Praise
“A major world writer . . . Choi is in thrilling command.” —Dwight Garner, The New York Times Book Review
“[Choi’s] best novel yet.” —Christopher Borrelli, Chicago Tribune
“Outstanding . . . Its dogged stumbling toward truth is touching and thrilling, often both at once . . . [A] major American novel.” —Sam Sacks, The Wall Street Journal
“[A] mystery kicks off Flashlight, propelling the plot forward, backward and sideways . . . [Choi is] a twenty-first-century Émile Zola . . . The novel ranks among her best work.” —Hamilton Cain, Los Angeles Times
“[Flashlight] will leave readers guessing until (almost) the very end . . . A sweeping, unsettling portrait of one family caught in the throes of change and torn apart by tragedy.” —Alexis Burling, San Francisco Chronicle