The National Book Foundation and The New Yorker have announced the Longlist for the 2025 National Book Award for Fiction. Included among this year’s nominees is Professor Susan Choi’s novel Flashlight. Professor Choi’s previous novel, Trust Exercise, won the 2019 National Book Award for Fiction. Her second book, American Woman, was a Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.
About Flashlight, the National Book Foundation writes: “Two of this year’s titles grapple with parental loss, coming of age, and the push and pull of memory and history. Spanning decades, continents, and continuously shifting between points of view, Flashlight follows the life of a woman whose father mysteriously disappeared one night by the sea when she was ten years old. That catastrophe echoes through Louisa’s adulthood in Susan Choi’s latest novel, which examines geopolitics and the family secrets that can irrevocably change our lives.” Read the full announcement here.
National Book Award Finalists will be announced on October 7. The winners will be announced live at the 76th National Book Awards Ceremony on November 19. This year’s ten longlisted titles were selected from a total of 434 books submitted by publishers for the 2025 National Book Award for Fiction.
Susan Choi is the author of Trust Exercise, which received the National Book Award for fiction, as well as the novels The Foreign Student, American Woman, A Person of Interest, and My Education. 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.
