Flashlight

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What to expect

Brought to you by Penguin.

A thrilling, globe-spanning novel that mines questions of memory, language, identity and family.

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.

Flashlight is a masterpiece that moves between the post-war Korean immigrant community in Japan, to suburban America, and the North Korean regime, to tell the astonishing story of one family swept up in the tides of twentieth century history.

'Ferociously smart and full of surprises, Flashlight is thrilling to the last' ELEANOR CATTON

'Instantly bewitching... a writer at the height of her spectacular powers' JENNIFER EGAN

'A brilliant feat of storytelling, both intimate and sweeping... an immersive, addictive story' ANGIE KIM

© Susan Choi 2025 (P) Penguin Audio 2025

Critics 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
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
Flashlight is a sensitive familial portrait, rigorous in its scope and complexity of feeling. Susan Choi is a master of rendering relationships with utter particularity
Raven Leilani, author of Luster
I devoured Flashlight. Once I started reading, I couldn't put it down, and once I finished, I couldn't stop thinking about it. The plot builds like a symphony rising to a crescendo, full of surprise and wonder. The story is as astonishing as it is entirely plausible. Susan Choi clearly knows well the fraught geopolitics of Korea and Japan, and did her homework
Barbara Demick, author of Nothing to Envy
In a brilliant feat of storytelling, both intimate and sweeping, Susan Choi has created a profoundly moving epic that blends a tender family portrait with a haunting examination of the Korean diaspora. Flashlight is that rare novel that has everything I want in fiction: gorgeous writing, fascinating characters I fell in love with, an immersive, addictive story with an ending that made me gasp, then cry. I'm in awe
Angie Kim, author of Happiness Falls
Sprawling, rootless, and windswept, Flashlight is a psychologically astute and beautifully intimate examination of family tragedy, told from both the micro-perspective of domestic mundanity, and the dizzyingly wide angle of international politics. It reads like a classic, a political thriller, but also a tender portrait of three people who do not fit, yet somehow find themselves to be a family
Jenny Mustard, author of Okay Days
A shapeshifting novel that reconfigures reality at every turn, Susan Choi's Flashlight is a powerful beam searching through the cavernous depths of alienation, of the cruel, fierce love binding a singular family, and the historical reverberations of unthinkable displacement and loss. With masterful control, Choi charts us through a journey that defies every expectation--its cumulative effect is epic, devastating, and incandescent
Aube Rey Lescure, author of River East, River West

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