Flashlight
by Susan Choi · 2025
Buy on AmazonOne 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.…
Recommended by
"Susan Choi took home the National Book Award for her previous novel, 2019’s slim, slippery Trust Exercise, a formally inventive portrait of adolescence that the prize jury described as “timely, mesmerizing, and, in the end, unsettling.” This time, Choi broadens her scope, with a story that draws on geopolitics even as it obsessively returns to a single family catastrophe that’s as formative as it is mysterious. Both books share an affinity for shocking twists, as well as the happy tendency to twist reviewers into knots just trying to come up with a spoiler-free synopsis. Flashlight was nominated for both the Booker Prize and the National Book Award."
NPR Books We Love — 2025 · apps.npr.org