Flashlight: A Novel

"I was very excited to learn that Susan Choi will also release a new book this summer: Flashlight , which the Wall Street Journal has declared to be the “first major American novel to be published this year.” It’s a complex family saga, which spans decades and continents. I won’t say much more, given Ron Charles’s warning in the Washington Post: “Watch what you read about it. Even categorizing this story as a mystery risks prematurely exposing the novel’s intricate structure to too much light… In these pages, timelines splinter, diverge and finally — trust her — come crashing back together with devastating revelations.” Out now in the US, and on 10 July in the UK. (I still think about Choi’s brilliantly readable and unsettling 2019 novel, Trust Exercise , which detangled the fraught power dynamics of a performing arts school, and which won a National Book Award for Fiction.)"

"Flashlight opens with the mysterious disappearance of a young academic from a beach. Though his young daughter, Louisa, is found, she barely remembers all that has just happened. From there, the story traces the many lives of a man once known as Seok Kang. The son of Korean immigrants in Japan, he becomes Hiroshi to escape discrimination. Later on, as a student in the United States, he adopts the name Serk. It is in the U.S that he meets Louisa’s mother, Anne. Serk’s chapters intertwine with those of other central figures: Anne, whose rebellious youth has given way to a life marked by illness and reflection; Tobias, her son, and Louisa, the daughter she shares with Serk. Around them orbit a cast of vivid secondary characters whose lives mirror and refract the novel’s central questions, from Serk’s relatives who left Japan for North Korea in search of dignity, to the friends and acquaintances whose lives intersect with Louisa and Anne’s lives through the years. As you read, you’ll notice fragments that quietly return, fitting back into the story in unexpected but powerfully resonant ways. It is a sweeping and profound novel, rendered with exquisite attention to detail. For me, writing often feels like a dance between doubt and those sudden flashes of clarity. A novel can start from the smallest things, a half-heard conversation, a song I can’t get out of my head, a stranger’s gesture that lingers longer than it should. Somehow, these pieces come together to form a constellation that captures my imagination, sometimes to the point of obsession. It always takes time and patience; you know there’s something there, but it only starts to reveal itself through the act of writing. I often think of that E.L. Doctorow line: “Writing is like driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.” Both of my novels began like that, what I thought were short stories that just kept growing until they showed me what they really wanted to be. With regards to Flashlight I read the short story after reading the novel and think both inhabit their respective forms so brilliantly. It is a joy to have both iterations in the world."