Tracing Invisible Currents: Multigenerational Stories – Fiction

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Susan Choi’s Flashlight: A Novel traces the disappearance of Louisa’s father across time, nations, and memory, after a tragic summer night on the breakwater. Spanning decades and through shifting perspectives, Louisa and her mother navigate grief, estrangement, and family secrets – and the invisible currents that shape our lives. In Kiran Desai’s The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny: A Novel, two young people first glimpse each other on an overnight train, bound by their grandparents’ failed matchmaking. Sonia, an aspiring novelist returning to India, feels haunted by a dark spell from her past, while Sunny, a struggling journalist in New York, flees family violence. Together they search for happiness across countries, classes, and generations. Gish Jen’s Bad Bad Girl: A Novel is a funny and moving autobiographical novel tracing a tumultuous mother-daughter relationship. Born to a wealthy family in Shanghai, Jen’s mother sails to America on the eve of revolution, only to repeat the harshness of her upbringing with her own daughter. Spanning continents and generations, Bad Bad Girl is a wise, courageous, and compassionate portrait of family.
Buy Flashlight: A Novel – Choi
Buy The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny: A Novel – Desai
Buy Bad Bad Girl: A Novel – Jen

Authors

SUSAN CHOI’s latest book is Flashlight: A Novel (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), which is currently longlisted for the National Book Award for Fiction and the Booker Prize. She is also the author of Trust Exercise: A Novel, which received the National Book Award for Fiction, and The Foreign Student: A Novel, American Woman: A Novel, A Person of Interest: A Novel, and My Education: A Novel. She is a recipient of the Asian American Literary Award for fiction, the PEN/W. G. Sebald Award, a Lambda Literary award, the Sunday Times Audible Short Story Award, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation. She teaches in the writing seminars at Johns Hopkins University and lives in Brooklyn, New York.

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