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.

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SHORTLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE 2025**

'Ferociously smart and full of surprises' Eleanor Catton

'A family epic... Engrossing' Sunday Telegraph**

'Extraordinary... Heartbreaking' Roddy Doyle

'Sheer pleasure' Financial Times

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.

'Big, bold and surprising' Guardian

'Instantly bewitching' Jennifer Egan

'Four generations' worth of family life... Endlessly dazzling' Vogue

'A major world writer... Choi has a profound gift' New York Times

'I couldn't put it down, and once I finished, I couldn't stop thinking about it' Barbara Demick