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What is Flashlight by Susan Choi about?
The novel opens with Louisa and Serk walking along a breakwater while Serk is on an academic secondment from his American university. Louisa later wakes on a beach, and her father is gone, apparently drowned. The disappearance fractures the family: Louisa and her American mother, Anne, return to the United States, while the circumstances surrounding Serk gradually come into view.
That opening gives the book an atmosphere of uncertainty, but Flashlight is not simply a missing-person mystery. Its focus widens from one family’s unanswered questions to the forces that shape where people belong and how they understand themselves. The story reaches from the post-war Korean immigrant community in Japan to suburban America and North Korea, moving across continents and decades.
How does the novel connect family history with larger upheavals?
Serk’s disappearance is the point from which the family’s history and the novel’s broader historical scope begin to intersect. The Booker Prize judges described the book as weaving national upheavals with the stories of Louisa, Serk and Anne. They highlighted its treatment of identity, hidden truths, race and national belonging, as well as its balance between historical tensions and intimate family drama.
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The result is a novel in which family memory is not separate from history. The characters’ lives unfold amid changing national and social contexts, and the story’s shifting geography and time deepen the uncertainty around what can be known about a person or a family. Calling the book a mystery can itself give away too much about its intricate structure; its revelations are part of a layered narrative rather than a straightforward investigation.
What inspired Susan Choi to write Flashlight?
In an interview published by the Booker Prize on 14 August 2025, Choi connected the novel to childhood memories of a trip to Japan and to stories of unexplained disappearances there in the late 1970s. She said: “It was a combination of being haunted by childhood memories of a trip to Japan – that was not catastrophic but was still very disruptive – and by stories about the unexplained disappearances, in the late 1970s, of ordinary Japanese people, including a schoolgirl not much older than me.”
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Choi also reflected on the timing of the book’s completion: “But I feel lucky, in that this moment does turn out to be a very receptive one for a story about ordinary people facing extraordinary, often malevolent forces.” These comments offer context for the novel’s origins without reducing its characters or events to a direct retelling of real cases.
Was Flashlight shortlisted for the Booker Prize?
Yes. Flashlight was shortlisted for the 2025 Booker Prize. The official Booker overview says the shortlist was selected from 153 works of long-form fiction in English published in the UK and/or Ireland between 1 October 2024 and 30 September 2025. That number describes the prize’s selection pool, not all novels published during the year.
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The 2025 prize went to David Szalay’s Flesh. Roddy Doyle chaired the judging panel, whose other members were Ayọ̀bámi Adébáyọ̀, Kiley Reid, Sarah Jessica Parker and Chris Power. The judges praised Flashlight for its cross-continental, cross-decade structure and its interweaving of private drama with national histories.
Independent reader supportYour contribution helps us test, update, and keep practical guides available for everyone.Publication details
Flashlight is Susan Choi’s sixth novel. The Booker Prize lists Jonathan Cape as its publisher and 10 July 2025 as its publication date.
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Sources
- The Booker Prizes: Flashlight
- The Booker Prizes: Susan Choi on Flashlight
- The Booker Prizes: 2025 results
- The Booker Prizes: 2025 shortlist overview
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