Latest news with #SusanChoi
Daily Mail
10-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Daily Mail
Esther Freud is back in our picks for the best Literary Fiction out now: MY SISTER AND OTHER LOVERS by Esther Freud, FLASHLIGHT by Susan Choi, THE GIRLS WHO GREW BIG by Leila Mottley
MY SISTER AND OTHER LOVERS by Esther Freud (Bloomsbury £18.99, 288pp) This slim but capacious novel begins with narrator Lucy preparing for a premiere. Although not named, it's obvious that the film is Hideous Kinky, adapted in 1998 from Freud's largely autobiographical debut novel of the same name which featured the then five–year-old Lucy as the protagonist. Lucy's bruising but always engrossing passage from child to adulthood provides the arc here, and we're deeply with her at every moment, whether she's watching Eric and Ernie at Christmas while her beloved sister injects drugs upstairs, or suddenly discovering three previously unknown half-brothers (Freud's father, the artist Lucian, was rumoured to have 30 children). Freud's alternately painful and funny story may cleave close to her fascinating life, but it begs larger questions too as Lucy's insight grows into the lasting legacy of her rootless bohemian upbringing. FLASHLIGHT by Susan Choi (Jonathan Cape £20, 464pp) Spanning decades, oceans and political ideologies, the drama in Choi's epic novel takes place on the largest and most intimate of stages. At the centre are the Kangs: Serk, Anne and Louisa. Though born in Japan, Serk doesn't discover he's ethnically Korean until the end of the Second World War. He subsequently emigrates to America, where he marries Anne and fathers Louisa. Rage, not love, is default in this fractious family, which keeps the novel's first half at a roiling boil. Then a family trip to Japan takes an apparently tragic turn. The truth, however, is far stranger than fiction – cue a spoiler-forbidding plot that draws on an incredible episode in late 20th-century geopolitics. It makes for an expanse of narrative ground to cover, but Choi's startling, bristling characters power this journey, which plays in the reader's mind with cinematic intensity. THE GIRLS WHO GREW BIG by Leila Mottley (Fig Tree £16.99, 352pp) Motley's debut, Nightcrawling – written when she was just 17 – earned her a Booker Prize longlisting. Her ample talent is on display again in this loose sequel, which follows an improvised sisterhood of mostly teenage Floridian moms, 'the Girls'. Shunned by their small town's community, they provide each other with support. But when pregnant, would-be Olympic swimmer Adela arrives, the dynamic is disturbed. Clever Emory, who dreams of college admission, finds in the newcomer the friendship she's been starved of. But the unwitting Adela is on an explosive collision course with the Girls' ringleader, Simone. Motley's tough, vital lyricism drives a fiercely compassionate novel about survival, hope, and love.
Telegraph
03-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
A sprawling family epic full of brains and mystery
Flashlight, the engrossing sixth novel by the American writer Susan Choi, opens with Louisa and her father making their way down a breakwater at the tail end of a Japanese sunset. Louisa's mother is absent: she 'isn't well'. Her father, who holds a flashlight in one hand and Louisa's hand in the other, confesses that he has never learned to swim: 'I grew up a poor boy. I had no YMCA.' He tells Louisa to 'act thankful now' to her mother for making her learn. And, Choi, writes, 'those are the last words he ever says to her. (Or are they the last words that she can remember? Did he say something more? There is no one to ask.)' He vanishes into the water. No body is ever found. Fans of Choi's work – which delights in playing with the reader's expectations – may remember the set up. This prelude was first published four years ago as a short story, also called Flashlight. At the time, Choi talked about 'wrestling with this material… trying to figure out what it wants to be – a short novel, or a long novel, or stories, or one story'. Her 447-page, six-part, sprawling family epic, which takes in five countries, spans several decades, and is mostly written in a free-indirect style that allows Choi to switch between four main characters, is her answer. The narrative proper begins with Louisa's father. It's spring 1945; he's six years old. His parents are Korean exiles, who left their homeland, Jeju island, for Japan, and while his Japanese name is Hiroshi, at home he is Seok. Later, when he emigrates to the US on a graduate visa, he goes by Serk. (Shifting identities are a running theme in Choi's work, not least in her last novel, Trust Exercise, a bestseller that won the 2019 National Book Award.) Next, we meet Anne, Louisa's mother, who has abandoned her family and her chances of a high school diploma for a man who abandons her once she becomes pregnant. She is forced to give up the baby, Tobias – after a vivid labour 'where the vengeance of God tore her entrails out by the roots' – but he will re-emerge later as a pivotal character. Novels developed from a short story are legion: Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway, Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections, Haruki Murakami's The Wind-Up Bird Chronicles, Charles Baxter's Saul and Patsy. But in freeing their writer from length restrictions, novels pose a counter-challenge: can a writer justify the many tangents of their narrative? Choi stripped most of the backstory out of her original story leaving her with plenty of gaps to fill in. Is Louisa's mother ill? Why did her father make them leave the US, and Louisa's fourth grade, for a sabbatical in Japan? And what is the significance of her father's flashlight? Choi takes too long to get to the meat of her story: what happened, or will happen, to Serk? Less patient readers may stop. But it pays to persevere. Choi is an astute, convincing writer, whose prose bristles with vivid imagery. In that opening section, 10-year-old Louisa lies in bed while 'the dark slid itself onto her chest like a snake, organising its weight into nearly stacked coils that might go on forever and bury her, crush her, if she didn't leap out of bed just in time.' Choi's choppy rhythm conveys a child's breathless angst. If Trust Exercise was about who controls a story, then Flashlight is about what happens when your own story is out of control. Louisa spends her life dealing with the aftermath of her father's supposed drowning. A child psychologist reminds her that she told the person who found her that her father had been kidnapped. 'No I didn't,' she retorts – the reality of what happened to them remaining a riddle for most of the novel. The book's title, Flashlight, is a metaphor that works hard throughout, illuminating certain events while keeping others in the dark. Serk doesn't know about Anne's son; Anne doesn't know about Serk's Korean heritage. The flashes of understanding that occur to characters as the decades roll by are like shapes that emerge from the gloom when someone sweeps a torch beam to and fro. And ultimately, the light Choi shines on an astonishing international scandal – revealed in the 'Acknowledgements' section for those who want to skip ahead – makes Flashlight a rewarding read. The expansion was well worth it.
The Guardian
01-07-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Flashlight by Susan Choi review – big, bold and surprising
The millennium is back – not just in fast fashion or TikTok remixes, but in the mood of American fiction. Think peak Chabon and Eugenides; the intellectual gymnastics of Helen DeWitt; the last profane and puckish gasp of Tom Robbins. That brief window – before 9/11, smartphones and the chokehold of autofiction – when the novel felt as playful as it did expansive: bold and baggy as wide-legged jeans. Joyce Carol Oates channelling Marilyn Monroe. Jonathan Franzen snubbing Oprah. You can feel that early-00s energy jostling through a new crop of American novels: Lucas Schaefer's The Slip, Kaveh Akbar's Martyr! and Maggie Shipstead's Great Circle are top-shelf examples. They're big in all kinds of wonderful, infuriating ways: antic, overstuffed and richly peopled. While it's less hyperactive than some of its book-fellows, Susan Choi's Flashlight still has the wide-legged feel of turn-of-the-century fiction: domestically sprawling, geopolitically bold. 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; a tight little knot of fury. 'This room is full of tricks to get children to talk, but you're too smart for them,' the doctor flatters her. 'I'm too smart for compliments,' Louisa snaps back. Louisa's father has drowned, and her mother has turned into a strange new invalid. What the girl feels defies grief or sympathy. This isn't mourning, it's mutiny; and it will take more than some avuncular desk jockey to tame her. While the doctor is distracted, she steals an emergency flashlight from his office and smuggles it home – 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 metaphors for a novel about absence and secrecy). There's one at a seance, its battery case loosened to summon some otherworldly flickering. Another at an archaeological dig in Paris. This is a story told in brief illuminations, like a child spinning a torch in a dark bedroom. Slices of light; slices of life. We begin with a flashback to Louisa's parents, meeting them before they meet each other. Her father, Serk, an ethnic Korean raised in Japan, is a child of postwar limbo. Caught between two nations, and claimed by neither, he trades his borderland life for a blank American slate – or so he thinks (America has other ideas). Louisa's father will be known by many names over the course of his life – Hiroshi, Seok, the Crab – but none of them will quite belong to him. Louisa will know him as Serk, an anglicised version of his Korean name. Louisa's mother, Anne, is an obstinate, spiky creature, allergic to expectation. Pregnant at 19, she gives birth to a child she's not permitted to keep, and her adult life shapes itself around her son's absence, like a house built around a locked room. Louisa will inherit her mother's bone-deep stubbornness – twin contrarians. They make an implacable, inscrutable pair, Serk and Anne; secret-keepers to the core, lonely apart and lonelier together ('Anne the odd white woman who had married the foreigner; Serk the odd foreigner who had married a white woman'). When Serk drowns, he leaves behind a silence so complete it swallows the past whole. And so Louisa is left with two absent parents: one right in front of her; the other near mythic. 'The sum of things she knew about her father could fit inside the sum of things she'll never know about him an infinite number of times,' Choi writes. 'The things she knows are as meagre as a pair of backgammon dice rattling in their cup.' Flashlight is a study of absence – absence of narrative, of inheritance, of place, of affection. Who are you, it asks, when there's no story to inherit, no history to claim? How might that void be filled, or inhabited or weaponised? It's a year for canon building, and as the best-of-the-century (so far) lists are tallied, Choi's previous novel, 2019's Trust Exercise, remains firmly on mine. It begins as a high-school drama, libidinous and gossipy, but midway through, Choi triggers a controlled implosion. From the wreckage, another story emerges: one about power, authorship and blame. Truth isn't fixed, Choi shows us here – it's framed. I love this novel's confident chaos, its metafictional brio. Flashlight delivers a comparable jolt – a truth-rattling rupture. We feel it building with a cruel inevitability, and when it arrives, it shifts the novel's moral (and political) terrain. To spoil the reveal would be churlish. The question is whether the novel can withstand the shock. It can – just. 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. The opening of Flashlight isn't the only set piece that could stand alone – and tall – as a short story. Sign up to Inside Saturday The only way to get a look behind the scenes of the Saturday magazine. Sign up to get the inside story from our top writers as well as all the must-read articles and columns, delivered to your inbox every weekend. after newsletter promotion Like the best of those early-00s novels, Flashlight is all kinds of big: capacious of intent and scope and language and swagger. Choi confronts a chapter of North Korean history that American fiction has barely touched. But there is something missing. That Y2K brand of irony – glib, evasive, laddish – is gone. Good riddance to it. It's hard to be flippant when you know which way the arc of the universe really bends. Flashlight by Susan Choi is published by Jonathan Cape (£20). To support the Guardian order your copy at Delivery charges may apply.
The Guardian
30-06-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Flashlight by Susan Choi review – big, bold and surprising
The millennium is back – not just in fast fashion or TikTok remixes, but in the mood of American fiction. Think peak Chabon and Eugenides; the intellectual gymnastics of Helen DeWitt; the last profane and puckish gasp of Tom Robbins. That brief window – before 9/11, smartphones and the chokehold of autofiction – when the novel felt as playful as it did expansive: bold and baggy as wide-legged jeans. Joyce Carol Oates channelling Marilyn Monroe. Jonathan Franzen snubbing Oprah. You can feel that early-00s energy jostling through a new crop of American novels: Lucas Schaefer's The Slip, Kaveh Akbar's Martyr! and Maggie Shipstead's Great Circle are top-shelf examples. They're big in all kinds of wonderful, infuriating ways: antic, overstuffed and richly peopled. While it's less hyperactive than some of its book-fellows, Susan Choi's Flashlight still has the wide-legged feel of turn-of-the-century fiction: domestically sprawling, geopolitically bold. 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; a tight little knot of fury. 'This room is full of tricks to get children to talk, but you're too smart for them,' the doctor flatters her. 'I'm too smart for compliments,' Louisa snaps back. Louisa's father has drowned, and her mother has turned into a strange new invalid. What the girl feels defies grief or sympathy. This isn't mourning, it's mutiny; and it will take more than some avuncular desk jockey to tame her. While the doctor is distracted, she steals an emergency flashlight from his office and smuggles it home – 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 metaphors for a novel about absence and secrecy). There's one at a seance, its battery case loosened to summon some otherworldly flickering. Another at an archaeological dig in Paris. This is a story told in brief illuminations, like a child spinning a torch in a dark bedroom. Slices of light; slices of life. We begin with a flashback to Louisa's parents, meeting them before they meet each other. Her father, Serk, an ethnic Korean raised in Japan, is a child of postwar limbo. Caught between two nations, and claimed by neither, he trades his borderland life for a blank American slate – or so he thinks (America has other ideas). Louisa's father will be known by many names over the course of his life – Hiroshi, Seok, the Crab – but none of them will quite belong to him. Louisa will know him as Serk, an anglicised version of his Korean name. Louisa's mother, Anne, is an obstinate, spiky creature, allergic to expectation. Pregnant at 19, she gives birth to a child she's not permitted to keep, and her adult life shapes itself around her son's absence, like a house built around a locked room. Louisa will inherit her mother's bone-deep stubbornness – twin contrarians. They make an implacable, inscrutable pair, Serk and Anne; secret-keepers to the core, lonely apart and lonelier together ('Anne the odd white woman who had married the foreigner; Serk the odd foreigner who had married a white woman'). When Serk drowns, he leaves behind a silence so complete it swallows the past whole. And so Louisa is left with two absent parents: one right in front of her; the other near mythic. 'The sum of things she knew about her father could fit inside the sum of things she'll never know about him an infinite number of times,' Choi writes. 'The things she knows are as meagre as a pair of backgammon dice rattling in their cup.' Flashlight is a study of absence – absence of narrative, of inheritance, of place, of affection. Who are you, it asks, when there's no story to inherit, no history to claim? How might that void be filled, or inhabited or weaponised? It's a year for canon building, and as the best-of-the-century (so far) lists are tallied, Choi's previous novel, 2019's Trust Exercise, remains firmly on mine. It begins as a high-school drama, libidinous and gossipy, but midway through, Choi triggers a controlled implosion. From the wreckage, another story emerges: one about power, authorship and blame. Truth isn't fixed, Choi shows us here – it's framed. I love this novel's confident chaos, its metafictional brio. Flashlight delivers a comparable jolt – a truth-rattling rupture. We feel it building with a cruel inevitability, and when it arrives, it shifts the novel's moral (and political) terrain. To spoil the reveal would be churlish. The question is whether the novel can withstand the shock. It can – just. 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. The opening of Flashlight isn't the only set piece that could stand alone – and tall – as a short story. Sign up to Inside Saturday The only way to get a look behind the scenes of the Saturday magazine. Sign up to get the inside story from our top writers as well as all the must-read articles and columns, delivered to your inbox every weekend. after newsletter promotion Like the best of those early-00s novels, Flashlight is all kinds of big: capacious of intent and scope and language and swagger. Choi confronts a chapter of North Korean history that American fiction has barely touched. But there is something missing. That Y2K brand of irony – glib, evasive, laddish – is gone. Good riddance to it. It's hard to be flippant when you know which way the arc of the universe really bends. Flashlight by Susan Choi is published by Jonathan Cape (£20). To support the Guardian order your copy at Delivery charges may apply.
Elle
10-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Elle
Susan Choi Recommends a Book So Engrossing It Made Her (Almost) Lose Her Luggage
Welcome to Shelf Life, What began as a short story in The New Yorker is now Susan Choi's sixth and latest novel, The Indiana-born, Texas-raised, New York-based bestselling author studied literature at Yale University; was once The New Yorker and co-edited Likes: theater; Dislikes: Good at: rocking her Bad at: cleaning menorahs; coming up with Scroll through the reads she recommends below. The book that…: …made me miss a train stop: It's not exactly a missed-the-train moment, but I was re-reading …made me weep uncontrollably: Philip Roth's …I recommend over and over again: Jenny Erpenbeck's …I swear I'll finish one day: All of Proust. Or even just some decent amount of Proust. I love the prose but also find it so exquisite it's almost unbearable to continue reading for any length of time, at least for me, which makes me feel like a total failure as a reader. I might have to set aside a year of my life just to read Proust. ...I read in one sitting; it was that good: Sarah Moss's …currently sits on my nightstand: …made me laugh out loud: Paul Beatty's …has a sex scene that will make you blush: In Francisco Goldman's ...I've re-read the most: ...makes me feel seen: looking at me, like it knew exactly who I was. The protagonist has, like me, a real culture-clash background, and up to the point in my life when I read the book—the '90s—I'd never encountered that in fiction, so it was very emotional when I finally did. ...everyone should read: ...I could only have discovered at ...fills me with hope: Everything by elating observer of us humans and the strange things we do. Bonus questions: If I could live in any library or bookstore in the world, it would be: The literary organization/charity I support: Read Susan Choi's Book Recommendations Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov Now 24% Off Credit: Vintage Everyman by Philip Roth Now 12% Off Credit: Vintage Visitation by Jenny Erpenbeck Now 66% Off Credit: New Directions Ghost Wall by Sarah Moss Now 50% Off Credit: Farrar, Straus and Giroux Real Americans by Rachel Khong Now 32% Off Credit: Vintage The Sellout by Paul Beatty Credit: Farrar, Straus and Giroux The Ordinary Seamen by Francisco Goldman Credit: Grove Press The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald Now 30% Off Credit: Charles Scribner's Sons A Feather on the Breath of God by Sigrid Nunez Now 36% Off Credit: Picador Paper Home Fire by Kamila Shamsie Credit: Riverhead Books
