A story of the lives of the three people who make a family, the one moment in history that shatters what held them together, and the reverberations of that event that last a lifetime One night, Louisa and her father take a walk out on the breakwater. He''s carrying the flashlight. He cannot swim. When Louisa awakens, she has washed up on the beach and her father is missing, likely drowned. She is ten years old. For the rest of her life, Louisa will be affected by that night-- the loss of her father, her inability to recover her memories, her anger at her mother for not joining them. What really happened to Louisa''s father? Why did they move to Japan that year? Who was the woman he took Louisa to see there? What was the mysterious illness that kept her mother home? And how can we connect, make a life, when there is so much we cannot see?

Autorentext

Susan Choi is the author of the novels Flashlight, Trust Exercise, My Education, A Person of Interest, American Woman and The Foreign Student. She has won the National Book Award for Fiction, the Asian American Literary Award for Fiction, the PEN/W. G. Sebald Award and a Lambda Literary Award, and has been a finalist for the Booker Prize and the Pulitzer Prize. Flashlight began as a short story and received the Sunday Times Short Story Award. Susan Choi lives in Brooklyn, New York, and teaches in the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University.

Klappentext

SHORTLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE 2025
WATERSTONES FICTION BOOK OF THE MONTH
LONGLISTED FOR THE WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTION 2026

A moment is all it takes to shatter a family. The echoes last a lifetime...

**'Ferociously smart and full of surprises' Eleanor Catton

'Engrossing... Full of brains and mystery' Telegraph**

One evening, ten-year-old Louisa and her father, Serk, take a walk out on the breakwater. They are spending the summer in a coastal Japanese town. Hours later, Louisa wakes on the beach, soaked to the skin. Her father is missing: presumably drowned.

This sudden event shatters their small family. As Louisa and her American mother return to the US, Serk's disappearance reverberates across time and space, and the mystery of what really happened that night slowly unravels.

A Book **of the Year for the Guardian, Time, New Yorker, Esquire, Vanity Fair, FT and Barack Obama

'Big, bold and surprising' Guardian

'Illuminates the buried secrets of the human heart' Oprah Daily

'Gorgeous... Almost impossibly heartbreaking' New York Magazine

'It will make your head spin in the best way' Dakota Johnson

'Endlessly dazzling' Vogue

READERS LOVE FLASHLIGHT**

'Compelling, fascinating, original. Read this book'
'Five stars. Heartbreaking'
'A beautifully written story of a family across decades'
'I loved it - the best read in years. Glorious'
'Absolutely brilliant'