Flashlight

bySusan Choi

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'Ferociously smart and full of surprises, Flashlight is thrilling to the last' ELEANOR CATTON

A thrilling, globe-spanning novel that mines questions of memory, language, identity and family.

One evening, ten-year-old Louisa and her father take a walk out on the breakwater. They are spending the summer in a coastal Japanese town while her father Serk, a Korean émigré, completes an academic secondment from his American university. When Louisa wakes hours later, she has washed up on the beach and her father is missing, probably drowned.

The disappearance of Louisa’s father shatters their small family unit. As Louisa and her American mother Anne return to the US, this traumatic event reverberates across time and space, and the mystery of what really happened to Serk slowly unravels.

Flashlight is a masterpiece that moves between the Korean immigrant community in post-war Japan, to suburban America, and the North Korean regime, to tell the astonishing story of one family swept up in the tides of twentieth century history.

'Instantly bewitching... a writer at the height of her spectacular powers' JENNIFER EGAN

'Susan Choi is a master of rendering relationships with utter particularity' RAVEN LEILANI

'Once I started reading, I couldn’t put it down, and once I finished, I couldn’t stop thinking about it' BARBARA DEMICK
In this superbly crafted book, the fraught geopolitics of family life — the official secrets, the acts of espionage, the diplomatic failures — are set against the intimacies, grievances, conflicting memories, and unmet needs of national allegiance. Ferociously smart and full of surprises, Flashlight is thrilling to the last
Eleanor Catton, author of Birnam Wood

About Susan Choi

Susan Choi’s first novel, The Foreign Student, won the Asian-American Literary Award for Fiction. Her second novel, American Woman, was a finalist for the 2004 Pulitzer Prize. Her third novel, A Person of Interest, was a finalist for the 2009 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. In 2010 she was named the inaugural recipient of the PEN/W.G. Sebald Award. Her fourth novel, My Education, received a 2014 Lambda Literary Award. Her fifth novel, Trust Exercise, won the 2019 National Book Award for Fiction – and was a US bestseller. Flashlight began as a short story and won the Sunday Times Audible Short Story Award in 2021. She lives in Brooklyn, New York and teaches in the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University.
Details
  • Imprint: Jonathan Cape
  • ISBN: 9781787335127
  • Length: 464 pages
  • Price: £20.00
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