The premise, of a family in Japan, draws on my experience directly, because I spent time in Japan with my family when I was a child. But what prompted the novel are less specific memories themselves than the hazy, fragmentary quality of my memories from that time, the extent to which they’re partial and distorted. My memories from that time feel like dreams, and their atmosphere is sometimes quite ominous. Eventually a storyline that departs pretty dramatically from any event of my life came along to suit that weird, ominous tone.
― Susan Choi, Interview, Lithub
What booksellers are saying about Flashlight
- An absolutely engrossing novel that delves deeply into identity, family, nationality, illness, and suffering. It is hard to describe the totality of the characters, since their essence is so shaped by what is done to them, as well as their perception what they have seen. When a displaced family is left adrift by a disappearance, their precarious and distrustful lives unravel in troubling and unexpected directions. This is a hard book to summarize…it goes it many different directions. There are mysteries solved, and threads that meander away. Susan Choi writing is as intricate as the story, but also wry and unsettling.
― Andrea Ginsky, Bookstore Number 1 LLC in Sarasota, Florida | BUY
- In Flashlight, Choi creates a family so perfect in its flaws, a hit in spite of all the misses, and lets the world, in all its gory glory, try to separate these seemingly debilitated magnets. Sometimes love’s slow match reaches the gunpowder just after the cannon sinks beneath the waves or compassions’ cannonball hits the target decades after the castle walls have become a tourist’s picnic backdrop. In the vein of Crossroads or The Bee Sting, each member of the family gets their chance to be both relatable and objectionable, all in the midst of a larger than life, and in this case semi-global, tragedy.
― Ian McCord, Avid Bookshop in Athens, Georgia | BUY
- A multi-faceted read based in a mystery. Louisa is a young girl who is out walking with her father, Serk, on the coast of Japan one evening. The next morning, Louisa’s body is found, barely alive, but her father is missing. What follows in the progression of this novel is an unraveling of each character’s history as the reader slowly pieces together this mystery using the breadcrumbs that Choi drops along the way.
― Sarah Goldstein, Old Town Books in Alexandria, Virginia
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- Haunting multigenerational tale deftly told. Choi shines a light (pun intended) on a gruesome topic, handling it with unflinching honesty and heart. Her characters move through time and trauma in a compelling way; urging us to follow along despite the difficult topics she explores: loss, alienation, and the search for connection. *Deliberately vague about the story to avoid giving away plot twists.
― Liz Feeney, E. Shaver, Bookseller in Savannah, Georgia
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About Susan Choi
Susan Choi is the author of Trust Exercise, which received the National Book Award for fiction, as well as the novels The Foreign Student, American Woman, A Person of Interest, and My Education. She is a recipient of the Asian-American Literary Award for fiction, the PEN/W. G. Sebald Award, a Lambda Literary award, the Sunday Times Audible Short Story Award, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation. She teaches in the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University and lives in Brooklyn, New York
If you talk about witches nowadays and you ask somebody to picture a witch, they’d probably say a pointy hat, a broom, a black cat. They are no longer considered malevolent.
