Susan Choi’s Booker-shortlisted sixth novel, Flashlight, first came to life as a short story in The New Yorker in 2020. Appropriately enough for a narrative that found its genesis during the chaos, the isolation, the punishing heartbreak of the Covid pandemic, Flashlight, in this novel form, turns into a story of fragmented families, disappointing relationships, unresolved trauma, and, defiant of the irrevocability of loss, a nebulous, spectral hope.

It starts as a memory, unspooling in the present, of ten-year-old Louisa and her father, Serk Kang, walking the shore while her mother, Anne, was “shut inside the small almost-waterfront house they are renting, most likely in bed.” The child’s preference for her father and, as an almost corollary, her impatience with her invalid mother are established in a sharp, short scene, where father and child walk into the water. He, indulgent, in his rolled-up slacks and his hard, polished shoes, carrying a flashlight she deems as unnecessary as his protective gesture of holding her hand; she, exuberant at having convinced him to accompany her on this nighttime adventure.

With an abruptness that often marks the unreliability of memory, the reader is plunged into the darkness of Louisa’s life after the loss of her father. Casual acts of...

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