{ "item_title" : "Flashlight", "item_author" : [" Susan Choi "], "item_description" : "A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: The New Yorker - Time - New York - The Washington Post - NPR - Los Angeles Times - The Boston Globe - The Guardian - Vanity Fair - Elle - Town & Country - Oprah Daily - The New York Post - 48 Hills - Financial Times - The Economist - Esquire (UK) - Kirkus Reviews - Electric Literature - PEN America - The Chicago Public Library - Los Angeles Review of Books One of President Obama's Favorite Books of 2025EXPLOSIVE. (The New York Times Book Review) - GORGEOUS. (New York) - SHOCKING. (NPR) - DEVASTATING. (The Washington Post) - ASTONISHING. (The Atlantic) - MARVELOUS. (NBC's Weekend Today in New York) Short-listed for the Booker Prize - Long-listed for the National Book Award - Long-listed for the Andrew Carnegie Medal - Short-listed for the Women's Prize for Fiction - Finalist for the Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards - Finalist for the Orwell PrizeA TeaTime and Get Lit Book Club Pick 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.", "item_img_path" : "https://covers2.booksamillion.com/covers/bam/0/37/461/637/037461637X_b.jpg", "price_data" : { "retail_price" : "30.00", "online_price" : "30.00", "our_price" : "30.00", "club_price" : "30.00", "savings_pct" : "0", "savings_amt" : "0.00", "club_savings_pct" : "0", "club_savings_amt" : "0.00", "discount_pct" : "10", "store_price" : "30.00" } }

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Some families don’t need politics to complicate their lives, but when politics do intervene, the repercussions can be devastating. That’s especially true for the family in Flashlight, a challenging and volatile novel by Susan Choi, whose last work, Trust Exercise, received the National Book Award.

This novel spans decades in the lives of its central family. In 1945, Seok, a 6-year-old ethnic Korean, lives with his family in a small town in Japan, where he was born. As he grows up, Seok is filled with “bone-deep competitiveness,” leading him to move to Tokyo for college after the end of the Korean War and then to the U.S. for graduate school. Most of the rest of his family returns to North Korea and hopes, in vain, that he will do the same.

In the U.S., Seok, now known as Serk, falls in love with Anne, a 23-year-old college student. At 19, Anne had a son and signed away custody to the boy’s father.

That’s heartbreaking enough, but Choi isn’t done. Serk and Anne marry and have a daughter, Louisa. When Louisa is in second grade, Anne gets a call from her son’s father, who asks if the boy, now a teenager, can spend some of the summer with her and her family. It would spoil the novel to reveal the misfortunes that occur during the boy’s stay, but they set up the most cataclysmic development yet. One day, after the family has moved from Michigan to Japan for Serk’s visiting professorship, he and Louisa go for a walk along the breakwater. Later, Louisa is found on the beach, barely alive, while Serk has disappeared and is presumed drowned.

Choi has many more punishments, sicknesses and plot twists to inflict in this satisfyingly unpredictable work. Flashlight is overly dense with historical detail, especially in its first 50 pages, but once it gets going, it’s an astute portrait of political upheaval, family dynamics and the constant need to recalibrate one’s expectations. The novel is an intellectual workout, but a rewarding one.