"Stretching from a strawberry farm in Indiana to the North Korean border, Choi's sixth novel reckons with the lies that undo families and underpin empires. Flashlight first appeared in the New Yorker as a short story a standoff in a psychiatrist's office. The novel opens here too. It is the late 1970s: 10-year-old Louisa has been dragged in for a consultation, and she's not playing nice. She waits out the clock, evading, deflecting."
"While the doctor is distracted, she steals an emergency flashlight from his office a low-stakes theft with high-voltage meaning. The night Louisa's father disappeared into the water, he was holding a flashlight. Portentous torches will appear throughout these pages (it's not the subtlest of a metaphor for a novel about absence and secrecy). This is a story told in brief illuminations, like a child spinning a"
Flashlight follows ten-year-old Louisa in the late 1970s as she resists adult control after her father's disappearance and her mother's incapacitation. The narrative moves from an Indiana strawberry farm to the North Korean border, connecting intimate family rupture to broader geopolitical lies. Louisa's early encounter in a psychiatrist's office establishes her evasive intelligence and a symbolic theft of an emergency flashlight. Flashlights and torches recur as metaphors for absence, secrecy and failed illumination. The story unfolds in short, illuminating episodes that blend child perspective, grief-as-mutiny, and investigations into the foundations of familial and imperial deception.
Read at www.theguardian.com
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