Flashlight

A story of the lives of the three people who make a family, the one moment in history that shatters what held them together, and the reverberations of that event that last a lifetime

'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