Jonathan Cape acquires new novel by National Book Award-winning Susan Choi

Jonathan Cape, an imprint of Vintage, Penguin Random House, has acquired the new novel by National Book Award-winning Susan Choi. Hannah Westland, publishing director at Jonathan Cape, acquired British and Commonwealth rights to Flashlight from Sarah Chalfant at the Wylie Agency. FSG have acquired North American rights. Flashlight will publish in the UK in July 2025.

Choi’s most recent book, Trust Exercise, won the 2019 National Book Award for Fiction. Her work has been awarded the PEN/WG Sebald Award, the Asian American Literary Award, the Lamba Literary Award, and been shortlisted for the PEN/Faulkner Award. In 2021, she was awarded the UK Sunday Times Short Story Award. She lives in New York.

The synopsis states: "The novel tells the story of one family, and the shocking event that transforms them. Louisa, and her parents, Serk, a Korean immigrant and academic, and Anne, whose delinquent youth has been papered over into suburban respectability. They spend a brief time in Japan when Louisa is a child, and that time is marked forever by tragedy – the disappearance of her father. Moving between the post-war Korean immigrant community in Japan, to suburban America, and the North Korean regime, the novel is a sweeping masterpiece illuminating hidden corners of 20th-century history, and their profound effects on individual lives."

Westland said: "Susan Choi is one of the great contemporary novelists. Her work is as attuned to the movements of history as it is to the hidden corners of our hearts, and this stunning book is her most ambitious yet. We can’t wait to publish it."