This month we have another brilliant recommendation from BookBar Book Club, Flashlight by Susan Choi — a taut, emotionally layered novel that explores the fragile architecture of family, identity and belonging. With her signature precision and psychological depth, Choi illuminates the quiet tensions between parents and children, love and control, and the stories we tell ourselves to survive. Intimate, intelligent and quietly powerful, Flashlight is a book that lingers long after the final page.
The astonishing story of one family swept up in the tides of the twentieth century, ranging from post-war Japan to suburban America and the North Korean regime. One evening, ten-year-old Louisa and her father, Serk, take a walk out on the breakwater. They are spending the summer in a coastal Japanese town. Hours later, Louisa wakes on the beach, soaked to the skin.
Her father is missing: presumably drowned. This sudden event shatters their small family. As Louisa and her American mother return to the US, Serk’s disappearance reverberates across time and space, and the mystery of what really happened that night slowly unravels…
Buy the book here.
February, 2026
