From the publisher: "WINNER OF THE 2019 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR FICTION In an American suburb in the early 1980s, students at a highly competitive performing arts high school struggle and thrive in a rarified bubble, ambitiously pursuing music, movement, Shakespeare, and, particularly, their acting classes. When within this striving 'Brotherhood of the Arts,' two freshmen, David and Sarah, fall headlong into love, their passion does not go unnoticed—or untoyed with—by anyone, especially not by their charismatic acting teacher, Mr. Kingsley. The outside world of family life and economic status, of academic pressure and of their future adult lives, fails to penetrate this school's walls—until it does, in a shocking spiral of events that catapults the action forward in time and flips the premise upside-down. What the reader believes to have happened to David and Sarah and their friends is not entirely true—though it's not false, either."

Flashlight opens with a mystery: in 1970s Japan, Louisa and her father Serk go for a walk by the shore at dusk, flashlight in hand. The two don’t return as expected. Hours later, searchers find Louisa, unconscious in the water, but her father is missing. Choi subsequently crosses generations and continents as she traces what happened in the decades before and after his disappearance, exploring the estrangements and sorrows of two families, how geopolitics impacts ordinary citizens, and (playing with that flashlight metaphor) how our limited understanding of the people we love causes us pain. An absorbing and satisfyingly complex epic.