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Flashlight: What Happens When Darkness Gets a Name
What happens when a novel built around uncertainty finally gives its darkness a name?
Susan Choi’s *Flashlight* begins with the disappearance of Serk, a Korean father living in Japan who walks onto a breakwater with his ten-year-old daughter and never comes back. What follows is a story about memory, migration, family silence, resentment and the different ways people learn to live around an absence they cannot explain.
But eventually, *Flashlight* does explain it.
This episode looks at what Choi’s novel gains from connecting Serk’s disappearance to the real history of North Korean abductions…
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