Flashlight

One night, ten-year-old Louisa walks the beach with her father. He carries a flashlight. He cannot swim. By morning, Louisa is found barely alive on the shore. Her father is gone.

In Flashlight, Susan Choi traces the ripples of that night through a fractured family: Louisa, the only child of parents severed from their own histories; Serk, a Korean man raised in Japan who cut ties when his relatives vanished into postwar Pyongyang; Anne, an American who left her own family behind; and Tobias, Anne’s estranged son, whose return changes everything.

What happened on that dark beach—and why? As the story circles back to that night, Choi explores grief, memory, and the blinding gaps between what we know, what we love, and what remains forever unseen.