Flashlight omslagafbeelding

Flashlight

A Novel

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Flashlight

Van: Susan Choi
Verteld door: Eunice Wong
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A Most Anticipated Book of the Year: Time, The Washington Post, and Literary Hub

A novel tracing a father’s disappearance across time, nations, and memory, from the author of Trust Exercise.

One night, Louisa and her father take a walk on the beach. He’s carrying a flashlight. He cannot swim. Later Louisa is found washed up by the tide, barely alive. Her father is gone. She is ten years old.

In chapters that shift from one member to the next, turning back again and again to that night by the sea, Susan Choi's Flashlight chases the shockwaves of one family’s catastrophe. Louisa is an only child of parents who have severed themselves from the past. Her father, Serk, an ethnic Korean born and raised in Japan, lost touch with his family when they bought into the promises of postwar Pyongyang and relocated to the DPRK. Her American mother, Anne, is estranged from her family after a reckless adventure in her youth. And then there is Tobias, Anne’s illegitimate son, whose reappearance in their lives will have astonishing consequences.

What really happened to Louisa’s father? Why did he take Louisa and her mother to Japan just before he disappeared? And how can we love, or make sense of our lives, when there’s so much we can’t see?

A Macmillan Audio production from Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Belletristik Coming of Age Familienleben

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Recensies van critici

“Flashlight is instantly bewitching: a mysterious family tragedy whose solution reaches beyond psychology into geopolitics. Susan Choi’s fictional investigation reveals a writer at the height of her spectacular powers.”
—Jennifer Egan, author of The Candy House

“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

“In a brilliant feat of storytelling, both intimate and sweeping, Susan Choi has created a profoundly moving epic that blends a tender family portrait with a haunting examination of the Korean diaspora. Flashlight is that rare novel that has everything I want in fiction: gorgeous writing, fascinating characters I fell in love with, an immersive, addictive story with an ending that made me gasp, then cry. I’m in awe.”
—Angie Kim, author of Happiness Falls

“Flashlight is a sensitive familial portrait, rigorous in its scope and complexity of feeling. Susan Choi is a master of rendering relationships with utter particularity.”
—Raven Leilani, author of Luster

“I devoured Flashlight. Once I started reading, I couldn’t put it down, and once I finished, I couldn’t stop thinking about it. The plot builds like a symphony rising to a crescendo, full of surprise and wonder. The story is as astonishing as it is entirely plausible. Susan Choi clearly knows well the fraught geopolitics of Korea and Japan, and did her homework.”
—Barbara Demick, author of Nothing to Envy and Daughters of the Bamboo Grove

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I felt the plot was at times unnecessarily long-winded, though it created depth. I did not think the performance of the reader brought out the different characters well enough, though she tried. Sometimes, the same tone was used for two different characters, male and female. There is room for improvement here. Overall, I enjoyed the novel.

The plot, language, and settings.

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Fascinating how a story around three unpleasant characters can keep you reading/listening. Really enjoyed the final third and the dénouement. Choi’s use of language is superb and often really funny. Disliked the reader’s voice intensely.

Korean machinations

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The heart of the book is the disappearance of Serk from a Japanese beach, which his accompanying young daughter Louisa barely survived. Born to Korean parents in Japan, then moving to the US, Serk is always an outsider, and the big themes of this book are identity, (not) belonging, and loss.

The titular flashlight comes up often, both blatantly as an object but also more subtly as a writing style - certain events or seemingly mundane conversations are minutely illuminated in great detail while half a decade and some quite momentous events (deaths, births) are barely mentioned, and the reader is left in the dark.

I’ve rarely enjoyed a book so much despite not liking any of the main characters- Serk, his wife Anne and Louisa are spiky, stubborn, often unkind and uncommunicative. I didn’t care for them, but I did care what happened to them. The second half of the book picks up pace and gets really interesting, horrifying and based on true events. A fascinating read, highly recommended.

immersive and intense story , full of surprises and new information

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