Flashlight

Shortlisted for the Booker Prize 2025, Flashlight is Susan Choi's astonishing generational saga tracing one family swept up in the tides of the twentieth century, from post-war Japan to suburban America and the North Korean regime. One evening, ten-year-old Louisa and her father take a walk on the breakwater in a coastal Japanese town where her father Serk, a Korean émigré, is completing an academic secondment. Louisa wakes hours later washed up on the beach, her father missing, probably drowned. As Louisa and her American mother Anne return to the US, the trauma reverberates across time and space, and the mystery of what really happened to Serk slowly unravels.

Why You Should Read?

• Shortlisted for the Booker Prize 2025 and praised by Eleanor Catton, Jennifer Egan, and the Financial Times as a rich generational saga that teems with intelligence.
• A sweeping literary mystery that spans post-war Japan, suburban America, and the North Korean regime across the twentieth century.
• Susan Choi renders family relationships with utter particularity, exploring how a single traumatic event reshapes lives across generations.
• An Own Voices story centered on a Korean émigré family, blending historical fiction with a slowly unraveling mystery.

About the Author

Susan Choi is an American novelist known for her intellectually ambitious, character-driven fiction. Her work has earned major critical recognition, including the prestigious honor of being shortlisted for the Booker Prize 2025 for Flashlight. She has written several acclaimed novels exploring identity, family, and history, and is widely regarded as one of the most astute and convincing writers of contemporary literary fiction, praised by peers such as Jennifer Egan, Raven Leilani, and Barbara Demick.