Susan Choi's "Flashlight" Is an Ode to Her 'Alternate-Universe Family' — See the Cover Here (Exclusive)
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11/20/2024 09:30 AM
The National Book Award-winning author's new novel will hit shelves in summer 2025
Acclaimed author Susan Choi has a new novel on the horizon.
PEOPLE has an exclusive first look at the cover of Choi's forthcoming novel, Flashlight, set to publish next summer through Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Louisa is 10 years old when she and her father, Serk, are last seen together taking a walk on the beach. Later, a barely aliveLouisa is found washed ashore, with Serk nowhere to be found.
Flashlight provides a look at what really happened that catastrophic night, and introduces readers to Louisa's family themselves. There's Serk, a Korean man who grew up in Japan; Anne, Louisa's American mother who is estranged from her family and Tobias, Anne's illegitimate son who reappears in the family's orbit.
For Choi, the novel is rooted in her own childhood memories, the author tells PEOPLE.
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"During my childhood my family lived in Japan for a little under a year, and my memories of that time have always been very eerie and dreamlike and hard to connect with the rest of my life," Choi says in an exclusive statement. "The story in Flashlight comes out of that feeling. It's about a family – not my family, but maybe my alternate-universe family, who are far less lucky than my family was."
"The first time the cover of Flashlight was shared with me, it came via email as a pdf file, and when I clicked the file open I felt the cover, even more than I saw it," Choi adds. "It gripped me with that same feeling – of being haunted by something, and of the boundary between the known and unknown. It also gave me a feeling of resilience, of someone at the very edge, but not giving up. I think it's incredibly beautiful."
Paul Myers
Susan ChoiThe author also says that choosing options for the cover itself was a difficult decision.
"The designer, June Park, actually created two versions of this design, which I thought of as 'sun' and 'moon,' or 'dusk' and 'midnight,'" Choi adds. "They're both equally gorgeous and it was so hard to choose between them that when I finally chose 'sun' I asked if I could have 'moon' as a poster – it's too bad books can't have two covers!"
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Choi is the author of multiple highly regarded novels, including Trust Exercise, which won the National Book Award for Fiction in 2019. She also wrote the novels My Education, The Foreign Student, American Woman and A Person of Interest. The author is the recipient of the Asian-American Literary Award for fiction, among other accolades, as well as a recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation.
Flashlight will be published on June 3, 2025 and is now available for preorder, wherever books are sold.
