Flashlight
- Auteur: Susan Choi (Verenigde Staten)
- Soort boek: Amerikaanse roman
- Uitgever: Jonathan Cape
- Verschijnt: 10 juli 2025
- Omvang: 464 pagina’s
- Uitgave: gebonden boek / ebook / luisterboek
- Prijs: £ 20,00
- Longlist Booker Prize 2025
- Boek bestellen bij: Amazon / Bol / Libris
Susan Choi Flashlight review en recensie
- “Flashlight is a sprawling novel that weaves stories of national upheavals with those of Louisa, her Korean Japanese father, Serk, and Anne, her American mother. Evolving from the uncertainties surrounding Serk’s disappearance, it is a riveting exploration of identity, hidden truths, race, and national belonging. In this ambitious book that deftly criss-crosses continents and decades, Susan Choi balances historical tensions and intimate dramas with remarkable elegance. We admired the shifts and layers of Flashlight’s narrative, which ultimately reveal a story that is intricate, surprising, and profound.” (Booker Prize 2025 jury)
- “Choi is one of contemporary literature’s great demolition artists, and her emotional foundations hold. She can build as well as she detonates. Choi gives her cast the room they need to live; to be more than vessels for political wrangling… Like the best of those early-00s novels, Flashlight is all kinds of big: capacious of intent and scope and language and swagger.” (Beejay Silcox, Guardian)
- “Flashlight is severely allergic to summary, so watch what you read about it. Even categorizing this story as a mystery risks prematurely exposing the novel’s intricate structure to too much light. It’s catholic in its genre, shifting deftly from domestic drama to international thriller, from academic satire to bildungsroman. But what can be safely revealed is that Choi is writing about people who struggle and fail to find a stable sense of identity in a shifting world conspiring against them.” (Ron Charles, Washington Post)
Flaptekst van de roman van de Amerikaanse schijfster Susan Choi
The astonishing story of one family swept up in the tides of the twentieth century, ranging from post-war Japan to suburban America and the North Korean regime.
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.
Susan Choi was born on 28 januari 1969 in South Bend, Indiana in the United States. Her 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.