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Flashlight

bySusan Choi

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'Ferociously smart and full of surprises' Eleanor Catton, author of Birnam Wood

'A rich generational saga that teems with intelligence' Financial Times

From post-war Japan to suburban America and the North Korean regime, this is the astonishing story of one family swept up in the tides of the twentieth century.

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.

'Big, bold and surprising' Guardian

'A writer at the height of her spectacular powers' Jennifer Egan, author of The Candy House

'Susan Choi is a master of rendering relationships with utter particularity' Raven Leilani, author of Luster

'I couldn’t put it down, and once I finished, I couldn’t stop thinking about it' Barbara Demick, author of Nothing to Envy

A rich generational saga that teems with intelligence, curiosity and, in terms of reading, sheer pleasure. Like the flashlight of its title it cast an evasive, variably illuminating beam…. It surely cannot be overlooked by this year’s Booker judges

Financial Times

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
  • Dimensions: 241mm x 38mm x 160mm
  • Weight: 688g
  • Price: £20.00
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