Flashlight (Shortlisted For The Booker Prize 2025)

**SHORTLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE 2025** 'A rich generational saga that teems with intelligence' Financial Times 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 emigre, 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. 'Big, bold and surprising' Guardian 'Engrossing... Choi is an astute, convincing writer' Sunday Telegraph Review: 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 * Author Biography: Susan Choi's first novel, The Foreign Student, won the Asian-American Literary Award for Fiction. Her second novel, American Woman, was a finalist for the 2004 Pulitzer Prize. Her third novel, A Person of Interest, was a finalist for the 2009 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. In 2010 she was named the inaugural recipient of the PEN/W.G. Sebald Award. Her fourth novel, My Education, received a 2014 Lambda Literary Award. Her fifth novel, Trust Exercise, won the 2019 National Book Award for Fiction - and was a US bestseller. Flashlight began as a short story and won the Sunday Times Audible Short Story Award in 2021. Choi lives in Brooklyn, New York and teaches in the writing seminars at Johns Hopkins University.