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 2025 “EXPLOSIVE.” (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 A 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.

The central metaphor of Flashlight is in the title -- this is a book about people only seeing what they choose to shine the light of their attention on. In that sense, Choi has written a tight and insightful novel about the ways that families misunderstand each other and how events of the past can be misinterpreted. The story focuses on the experience of a family of three, following their lives as the father Serk disappers in a mysterious moment on a beach and exploring how they understand their relationships as tyears pass. During this journey, Choi explores the history of Korea and depicts a campaign of North Korean propaganda and espionage that no one in NUBClub had ever heard about prior. Choi explores a lot of ground in the novel, but her understanding of the characters and depictions of their struggles is remarkably true and nuanced. While secondary characters are occasionally only sketches, the protoganists and main secondary characters (notably the step-brother Tobias) are complex and believable. Of particular note is the delicacy and vividness that Choi provides to the mother's (Anne's) MS condition, showing the struggle that her life is without ever reducing her to a caricature. However, the believebility of this characters in part lies in their misunderstandings and unfairness to each other, and this is where some of NUBClub had problems with the novel. All three main characters are unlikeable in significant ways. We disagreed on how much we could emphasize with each of them, but everyone agreed that the daughter Louisa was just awful. Not unrealistically awful -- we could all point to ways we had seen Louisa exist in the world -- but the fact that she consistently doesn't learn to escape her narcissitic worldview and find compassion for her mother was so offputting that it soured some of us on the whole novel. Also, the ending landed a bit flat; we appreciated that Flashlight had some closure to it, but it felt a bit contrivied in a novel that was otherwise so unforgiving. Flashlight is a very good, very skillful novel. Most of NUBClub recommends it to you. However, be warned that the light here is harsh and you're going to see some ugly stuff.