Flashlight by Susan Choi

LONGLISTED FOR THE WOMEN’S PRIZE FOR FICTION 2026
SHORTLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE 2025

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 take a walk out on the breakwater. They are spending the summer in a coastal Japanese town while her father Serk, a Korean émigré, completes an academic secondment from his American university. When Louisa wakes hours later, she has washed up on the beach and her father is missing, probably drowned.

The disappearance of Louisa’s father shatters their small family unit. As Louisa and her American mother Anne return to the US, this traumatic event reverberates across time and space, and the mystery of what really happened to Serk slowly unravels.

REVIEWS

“Slippery and explosive.”The New York Times Book Review

“[A] door stopper that will leave readers guessing until (almost) the very end . . . A fictional reimagining of one of history’s darkest chapters and a sweeping, unsettling portrait of one family caught in the throes of change and torn apart by tragedy.”
―San Francisco Chronicle

“In Choi’s novels, memory is fallible, people are not always who they seem to be, and the past can always be counted on to force its way back into the present. This makes her books hard to write about but a lot of fun to think about and to read.”―Emily Gould, New York Magazine’s “Book Gossip”

PRODUCT DETAILS
Hardcover Edition
Publisher: Jonathan Cape
ISBN:  978-1787335127
Pages: 464