The astonishing story of one family swept up in the tides of the twentieth century, which takes them 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.
A rich generational saga that teems with intelligence, curiosity and, in terms of reading, sheer pleasure. Like the flashlight of its title it cast an evasive, variably illuminating beam…. It surely cannot be overlooked by this year’s Booker judges - Financial Times
Choi is one of contemporary literature’s great demolition artists, and her emotional foundations hold. She can build as well as she detonates… Like the best of those early-00s novels, Flashlight is all kinds of big: capacious of intent and scope and language and swagger - Guardian
Engrossing... Choi is an astute, convincing writer…Flashlight [is] a rewarding read - Sunday Telegraph
An ambitious generational saga meets mystery thriller that spans several decades and countries… The story begins with a disappearance, then ripples out from there for a compulsive read - BBC, Summer Reads of 2025*
Choi’s startling, bristling characters power this journey, which plays in the reader’s mind with cinematic intensity - Daily Mail
In this superbly crafted book, the fraught geopolitics of family life — the official secrets, the acts of espionage, the diplomatic failures — are set against the intimacies, grievances, conflicting memories, and unmet needs of national allegiance. Ferociously smart and full of surprises, Flashlight is thrilling to the last - Eleanor Catton, author of Birnam Wood
Flashlight is instantly bewitching: a mysterious family tragedy whose solution reaches beyond psychology into geopolitics. Susan Choi’s fictional investigation reveals a writer at the height of her spectacular powers - Jennifer Egan, author of The Candy House
