Books for Lunch

Born in South Bend, Indiana, to a Korean father and a Jewish mother, Choi was raised there and in Houston, Texas. She studied literature at Yale and writing at Cornell, and worked for several years as a fact-checker for The New Yorker.

Choi is the author of “Trust Exercise,” which received the National Book Award for fiction, as well as the novels “The Foreign Student,” “American Woman,” “A Person of Interest,” and “My Education.” She is a recipient of the Asian-American Literary Award for fiction, the PEN/W. G. Sebald Award, a Lambda Literary award, the Sunday Times Audible Short Story Award, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation.

She currently teaches in the Writing Seminars, a creative writing program at Johns Hopkins University, and lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Choi’s sixth novel, “Flashlight,” was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, was chosen as a Best Book of the Year by the Chicago Public Library, Kirkus, NPR, The New Yorker, Time, and was a Washington Post choice for a Notable Work of Fiction from 2025.

The story begins one summer night, when 10-year-old Louisa and her father take a walk on the breakwater. Her father is carrying a flashlight. He cannot swim. Later, Louisa is found on the beach, soaked to the skin, barely alive. Her father is gone.

Louisa is an only child of parents who have severed themselves from the past. Her father, Serk, is Korean, but was born and raised in Japan; he lost touch with his family when they bought into the promises of postwar Pyongyang and relocated to North Korea. Her American mother, Anne, is estranged from her family.

But now it is just Anne and Louisa, adrift and facing the challenges of ordinary life in the wake of catastrophe. United, separated, and also repelled by their mutual grief, they attempt to move on. But they cannot escape the echoes of that night. What really happened to Louisa’s father?